More Milbank

Jim Faulconer's "experiment in blog discussion" regarding John Milbank's essay may not be everyone's cup of tea--it has prompted many heavy, lengthy responses, not the least of which have been my own contributions. Anyone interested criticisms of Milbank's ruminations on Christianity, sin, socialism, and politics will find plenty over there. But, just to amend my previous post, I wanted to add a couple of comments relevant to the discussion about Milbank and "theological politics" in general, both over there and elsewhere.

1) One theme that has regularly emerged from that discussion is what Milbank, and any other advocate of a system of gift-giving, one grounded in a "constantly renegotiated and agreed upon standards concerning the human common good," as a replacement for the liberal marketplace, has to say about "pluralism." According to some readings, Milbank cannot help but be demanding a shrinking of human liberty and diversity; it is the marketplace and the neutral public sphere alone--in short, the social order advocated by John Stuart Mill--which have the ability to manage the full modern diversity of exchanges and desires without a stunting of human growth. Anything more teleological than that--and Milbank's careful "vox populi, vox Dei" justification of democracy certainly qualifies!--involves a sacrifice of plurality. This is a complicated issue, not one easily resolved outside of an ontological consideration of the presumptions involved. To hearken back to my hermeneutics post, what seems to be central to this matter is how we account for the individual, and the argument over whether modern plurality has fundamentally collapsed, or merely complicated, the ability of the individual self to discern a truthful, believable moment in their history and community. Isaiah Berlin famously argued that such belief--the ability to assume unifying descriptions and political policies such as a "human common good"--requires the prior assumption that society is like an organism, growing in such a way that can be discerned and worked with (by those "gardeners" in the know, presumably). Milbank, with his talk about aristocratic and monarchial elements necessarily balancing out the democratic, certainly seems subject to this accusation. Yet for my part, it seems foolish to believe that the Christian faith is merely "speculative," something with only private and individual application since it cannot (or should not be allowed to) amount to a fully public, progressive claim. Thank God such people as Martin Luther King didn't believe that! (Regarding whom, see this provocative review of a wonderful recent book by Charles Marsh, as well as this discussion over at Cliopatria, to get some insight about how civil rights movement was, but also wasn't, example of radically Milbankian "theological politics.")

Of course it may be that the liberal order itself, even the neutral marketplace of goods and ideas, is itself a religious achievement, and so criticizing it for failing to put the pluralism it allows for in the context of an always-sought-for, always-improved-upon, always-revised "architectonic" truth, would be to only undermine the necessary truth that is already there. I think this is a rather "sectarian" interpretation of religious providence, one that assumes a complete disjunction between the revelatory background of human (and particularly Christian) speech and experience, and human history itself. (For Mormons and other restorationist Christians, it's obvious how debates over the "apostasy" come into play here.) That being said, Milbank's utter contempt for modernity is too great, and I shouldn't allow my enthusiasm for much of what he says to blind me to that. The open field of individual action provided by liberalism is by no means wholly occupied by socio-economic and political forces inimical to Christian truth. People like Milbank (and myself, when I get my radical dander up) need to by reminded that while the ontology of other careful Christian critics of liberal modernity like Charles Taylor and Oliver O'Donovan is particularly chastened, their politics are. Of course, there is a fine line to walk here, between treating a polity's necessarily prudent struggle to articulate (and reform itself socially, culturally and economically so it can better attend to) higher truths as a meaningful enterprise in itself, or treating such as ultimately just a strategy to keep citizens virtuous or in line (depending on whether you prefer Tocqueville or Foucault). Challenges like Milbank's help keep, I think, Christians on the right side of that line.

2) Clark Goble, a superb thinker and blogger, makes some criticisms of Milbank's project that land very close to home as well, just as much as the matter of pluralism: that of epistemology. He writes:

Milbank misses the very reason why the Enlightenment happened. It is fine and good to say that there is a "transcendent" truth that ought to guide us. But in practice none of us know it....If we replace exchange of goods by gifts, have we really accomplished anything? How are we to maintain the other-looking focus of a gift in opposition to the self-looking focus of purchase and exchange? Isn't the gift doomed to be supplanted by the counterfeit of the exchange? We can hold a hope that it won't, but once again, how epistemologically do we judge the presentation of the other? Is it a gift or a purchase price?...In effect all of Milbank's desires depend upon a consensus that is absent from the history of mankind. It is this recognition that ushered in the Enlightenment and provided its success. Now if the Enlightenment errs by providing too much power to the individual instead of the community bound by transcendence, it does so only because there is no other choice. As the saying go, no one says it is a great system, only that it is the best system. The problem with transcendence of the sort Milbank desires, is that there is no way to reach agreement upon what it means in a fashion that doesn't presuppose agreement. No way to discern the charitable gift from the commercial exchange, no way to distinguish the attempt to lift up the worker from the attempt to profit from them. Without the solving of this epistemological problem, it seems the solution Milbank offers never can be what he wishes it to be.

This is a powerful defense of the practical "secularization" effect of the Enlightenment. Even assuming that one does not go all the way with Descartes and Mill and turn truth into something with only individual provenance, even if one does allow for some historical and public continuity between Christian revelation and political life, there remains the problem of how it is to be taught. How does anyone ever learn what it is, when everyone has their own agendas and perspectives, with differing resources and levels of access and everyday experiences? How could it ever be communicated, much less legislated, in a political context of competition and compromise? Breaking humanity up into the sort of small communities capable of realizing Rousseau's general will seems one possibility, except that--besides all the other quite legitimate accusations which can be brought against Rousseau--the social contract he envisioned had nothing whatsoever to do with history; on the contrary, he thought the normative force of history lost to modern human beings, particularly Christian history.

To be sure, Milbank doesn't provide much by way of a positive program here at all. Still, one might look closely at the attachment Milbank has to the church, and specifically the rituals of the church, as possessing a tutelary function. Ritual education is not the same as propositional education, though there are some obvious overlaps. Through various rites, we become "educated" to a context of believing and behaving, not necessarily a specific content as to the elements of that belief and behavior. This is a point made Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as one assumed by Confucianism: the binding force and normative guidance provided by a tradition of practices and rituals has less to do with any set of agree-upon claims about the nature and worth of those practices then with affective shaping and mutual recognition participation in them provides. The propositional truth of being a good teacher is something that we teachers, as a polity, could never agree upon, even if we agree such a proposition truth existed; but we could all recognize the power of, and consequently expect adherence to, a united context of "teacherly" behavior--lecturing, conversing, counseling, reading, writing, and so forth; habits expressed in innumerable ritualistic ways. For Milbank, the rites of the church, in making a context of giving and receiving central (through the taking of communion, the singing of hymns, the participation in church work, and so forth) to our lives, teaches and unifies us around principles of the gift which can guide our political determinations. And so the epistemological problem of modernity, while not wholly elided (there will still need to be, in our diversified and technologically changed world, a Ricoeurian "second naivete"), is nonetheless transformed by thinking about (self-)reflection as incapsulated through the immanent power of rites. Still, that leaves unanswered the question of exactly how rites are to woven into a constitutional order, and it is here that one can find a good use for Rousseau, and many of the Romantic thinkers who followed in his wake: without giving proper due to the cultural and religious origin and memory of one's community, then any given set of civic rituals will likely seem merely grafted on, more arbitrary than popular. Which is one reason, unfortunately, so much communitarianism seems oppressive: too many theorists propose collective responsibilities and rituals simply for sociological reasons, without connecting them to the necessary idiosyncrasies of life. There's no reason to believe this will be a simple project; it seems much easier for education to be confined to teaching individuals their rights and letting it go at that. And certainly, given the speed of modern society, in which the socio-economic space for people to develop real vocations that they can learn from and build upon, the time necessary for such ritualistic, reflective education that would support a theological politics is less and less available all the time. But that, of course, is exactly why Milbank, in launching this broadside against modernity, insists on beginning with a radical socialist claim about the need to build upon the "gifted" aspect of the human economy in the first place.

John Milbank's Theological Politics

Next up: John Milbank.

A few weeks ago, Jim Faulconer (an old professor of mine, one of my co-bloggers at Times and Seasons, and a good friend) pointed out to several of us an essay by the theologian John Milbank, titled "Liberality versus Liberalism" (found here). Milbank is one of the major figures in a movement its advocates have described as "radical orthodoxy," and for one reason or another Jim finds much of what they have to say appealing; I do too. Jim's idea was to try to get several bloggers to read and comment at length on the essay, and see where the discussion took us. My comments are appended to Jim's original Times and Seasons post; I'd strongly recommend reading his post if you want a good introduction to radical orthodoxy, as well as preview of the essay itself (which is dense, fairly exploratory, and not always well-argued). As for my comments, they're pretty lengthy, and partly discuss matters pertinent only to Mormons like myself approaching the project of political theology, so I'm only going to excerpt them here.

*****

Christianity proposes that God has revealed His will and love to humankind in a particularly interruptive way--namely, through the birth, teachings, atonement and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. This revelatory act puts all of history, and everything that happens in history, in "the shadow of the cross," to use an old Christian phrase. But that shadow is all we have; we know that everything is different once we accept that Christ is not just our God but also our King, but what are the specifics of those differences? In practice, one finds a large amount of relatively empty "space" between the revelatory event at the center of history and ordinary political life. And so the tradition of "political theology" emerges as a way to philosophically connect the nature and needs of political life with that absolute standard which shapes and bounds it, but does not explicate all its details.

Theologians like John Milbank want to upset this tradition; they are trying to re-assert the primacy of the Christian revelation, and the community of believers it calls into being, to our assessment of every moment, including every political moment. This is not simply the personal "what would Jesus do?"-type questions every Christian child gets taught at one point or another in Sunday school; this is an attempt to instantiate a Christian reality in the places we are, rather than bracketing it as something which shapes and guides our otherwise secular places and perspectives in a background fashion. One might call it a shift from "political theology" to "theological politics," wherein the church--the body of believers--is itself understood to be the primary polis of everyday life. There isn't anything explicitly original about this task; there have been "holiness" movements that have sought to create their own Christian polities since the very beginning, the Anabaptist movement being the most diverse and well-known. But the theologians of this "emergent" school of theological politics, as it has come to be called--people like Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, John Howard Yoder, and others--eschew rejectionist approaches; instead, they seek to confront the task of coming up with an overarching alternative to the secular liberal political and economic principles so entwined with the dominant tradition of Christian theological speculation in the Western world.

In the essay in question, Milbank suggests that the solution is to be found in "liberality" rather than "liberalism." What he means by liberality is perhaps better captured in a phrase he uses in other, similar essays of his: "socialism by grace." His aim in this phrase is to pry egalitarian and socialist concepts away from, as he puts it, "materialism and the State," and instead argue that it is not implausible to imagine a socio-economic arrangement, a polity, wherein interactions between persons were governed by principles of grace and "the gift," rather than interest and advantage. The neutral, liberal space of the modern West is, according to many theorists (and certainly Milbank), the inevitable result of a theory of the human person which posited the ability to think, act, earn and exchange with other persons as being wholly internal to the human mind: we are born to be rational, self-revising, calculators. That no reputable liberal philosopher ever believed this to be entirely the case is, in a sense, irrelevant; by putting the critical individual first, we cannot avoid making it imperative that politics attend to the division between what is "private" and what is "public," and restrict collective action to the latter. As it is in the public interest that individuals be able to peaceably pursue their private aims, but it is decidedly not in the public interest to determine what those private ought or ought not be (outside of materially harmful aims, of course), the best polity will be one that imposes only a minimal structure upon socio-economic activity: people can trade or save, worship or sleep in, teach their children poetry or pushpin, as they will. The better liberal thinkers have always recognized that all this activity, if it is not to break down into vapid majoritarianism or, worse, anarchic nihilism, will have to have some sort foundation in truths larger than individual desire. The question is whether that foundation is strong enough to endure the irreligious practices which liberal theory holds it to, rightly, make possible. Milbank is one of those who does not, and his rejection of the liberalism is grounded in his belief that the liberal achievement fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sin:

[T]he central premises of liberalism . . . are based in Manichean fashion upon the ontological primacy of evil and violence: at the beginning is a threatened individual, piece of property or racial terrain. This is not the same as an Augustianian acknowledgment of original sin . . . [which is] a hopeful doctrine, since it affirms that all-pervasive evil for which we cannot really account . . . is yet all the same a contingent intrusion upon reality, which can one day be fully overcome through the lure of the truly desirable which is transcendent goodness . . . Liberalism instead begins with a disguised naturalization of original sin as original egotism: our own egotism which we seek to nurture, and still more the egotism of the other against which we need protection.

Let me attempt an unpacking of that condemnation. Liberalism begins with a theory of the self which assumes the existence of an ego that is, in the end, fully its own; I'm me, and never, ultimately, after all is said and done, anyone else's. Similarly, God is God, and what is God's is His and no one else's. If this is taken to be the field wherein which all possible behavior is construed, then "sin" is a violation of space; it is a matter of damage to that which belongs to someone else, or infringement upon the authority that someone else possesses. It's an egotism, in other words; it makes the mine and matters of right essential to all forms of consciousness. (And, perhaps not coincidentally, makes God over into very much the despot which Hobbes imagined Him to be: a God whose right to be treated as God flows from His power to make us acknowledge Him as such.) Liberalism takes this twisting of a fundamental theological concept, and applies to political existence: any prudent politics will respond to sin (or "human nature") by thinking in terms of how to establish both limits and incentives in regards to the actions of individuals. Since the individual is essentially understood through ownership, the problems of politics are matters who determining who owns what and that is owed to the owners of this thing or that thing, etc. The traditional liniments of sovereignty, citizenship, justice and so forth all follow in line from this determination. Milbank, however, insists that this displaces our attention, which should be on the constitution of the individual. Ownership, sovereignty, and so forth all flow from an original egotistical assumption which is itself sinful--a perversion of the essentially selfless world which Christ calls us to. The real world is not a world that can be parceled out, Milbank is saying; the real world is a gift. Thus does Milbank point us towards a socialism of grace--an egalitarian economic arrangement of mutual work and gift-giving that recognizes the irreducibly "social" nature of all things and endeavors, but does not plug that sociality, as Marx did, into a dialectic contingent upon a history of capitalism. Milbank is, of course, a Marxist in perhaps the most important sense: as he writes, "humans identity themselves through the production and exchange of things." Our love for one another, and our love for God, is instantiated through material work; the reality of "welfare," "generosity," and "charity" is found in goods and labor, not in intent. (That's not an invitations to "works righteousness," but rather an insistence that a loving will, one that has submitted to God, will apply its own expression to material objects; it will not be a free-floating, professed ideological sentiment.) So a Christian polity must be one which attempts to create an environment where "contract is subordinated to gift," where our everyday lives--as students, friends, spouses, teachers, builders, farmers, children, parents, etc.--is wholly and totally given over to a collective, social awareness of what we freely receive and what we freely impart, not how we, as individual selves, relate to power or satisfy personal interests.

What on earth would be the temporal requirements of such a socialist polity? Well, socio-economically speaking what is necessary is a far wider and more equitable distribution of land, the empowerment of local craft-making and industries over larger and impersonal commercial interests, an immediate retreat from the homogenizing effects of global trade, and a whole raft of proposals that Milbank in this essay barely hints at, but which are probably familiar to anyone who has read much agrarian, populist, or early (as opposed to Marxist-Leninist) socialist literature. This is an important point to emphasize, for Milbank is neither a progressive Christian hoping to guilt other Christians into ameliorating the alienating consequences of modern life, nor a liberation theologist who has been caught up in a dream of revolution. On the contrary, he sounds about as conservative (and hence as radical) as the Kentucky farmer and essayist (and perennial trouble-maker) Wendell Berry when he writes that:

[An] economy of fair-traded food-items may not sound dramatic or decisive, and indeed they remain pathetically marginal and often compromised, but nevertheless the extension of such gift-exchange bit by bit is the sure way forward rather than revolution, government action alone, or else capitalistic solutions. . . . We need once again to form systematic links between producer and consumer co-operatives and we need to see an emergence of cooperative banking (perhaps supervised by Church, Islamic and Jewish bodies) to regulate and adjudicate the interactions between many different modes of cooperative endeavor. Only this will correct the mistake of all our current politics: namely, to suppose that the "free market" is a given which should be either extended or inhibited and balanced. For if the upshots of the free market are intrinsically unjust, then "correcting" this through another welfare economy is only a mode of resignation; moreover Sisyphean, and periodically doomed to go under with every economic downturn.

The more explicitly political aspects of this essay deal with how such a socio-economic arrangement is to be preserved in the modern world; as experience teaches us, cooperative arrangements tend to lack in staying power when arrayed against the temptations of the universally liberated human self. Milbank plainly doesn't think liberal, representative democracy is adequate, preferring something more participatory. I agree with him--and yet it is here that I think Milbank's essay shows the most weakness. The logical connection between Milbank's theological agenda and the socio-economic reforms he thinks implied by such is strong; to deny his critique of capitalism requires, I think, nothing less than to engage and critique the fundamentals of his religious ontology. But when he turns to the constitutional requirements of a polity which could provide a literal as well as an ideological defense against the secular world, Milbank's ideas become, I think, rather hackneyed.

Consider his contempt for both populism and nationalism as, apparently, nothing other than instances of either mobocratic relativism, elite manipulation, or both. Yet far from being enemies of the sort of reciprocal communitarianism he has in mind, both phenomena are fundamentally about developing and expressing affective attachments between persons; neither necessarily have anything to with majoritarianism or contractarianism, but rather are expressions of, and arguments for, participatory civic identities and economic arrangements that empower those most responsible for producing the conditions which sustain the possibility of participation in the first place. To give credit to one's own nation or vocation is to connect one's own identity to a larger, communal project, thereby both drawing from it as well as contributing to it--in other words, it is a context for reciprocation. Milbank, recognizing that there has to be some criteria for situating the polity he desires, talks in the essay about how Christianity looks to "natural pre-given 'regions,'" as well as "metiers, local cultures, religious bodies, etc." Well, what does he imagine nations are built out of, and what does he imagine populist political movements are trying to defend, except exactly all of these? An important argument can be made to the effect that national bodies formed--around shared mores, histories, cultural practices, religious commitments, and most importantly language groups--primarily so as to maintain some sort of continuity with the "pre-given" socio-economic communities in which the lives of the people who lived there were embedded; nationality, according to this theory, emerged as part of a "call to difference" experienced by individuals who recognized that their ability to fully and reciprocally relate to their fellow man was being diluted by an expansion of the public sphere (driven by innovations in technology, travel, administration, trade, and so forth), and who over a period of generations drew out from that expansion a new "social imaginary," one which preserved the essence of the sort of (potentially) loving and reciprocal relationships which existed beforehand. Obviously, only a truly deluded nationalist would believe that modern relationships have perfectly superceded all prior forms of association; what is needed (and which conservative critics of liberal triumphalism have always insisted) is various levels of attachment, ranging from the local on upwards, each contributing to a rich social existence (and thus, from a Milbankian perspective, the means for a truly theological politics). There seems to be no good reason for Milbank to insist that only a certain category of bodies (either intimately local or transcendentally cosmopolitan) can serve to situate gift-giving, and dismissing without argument a whole range of similar bodies that have emerged over the past few centuries as somehow essentially tainted by the liberal virus. (Note that I am not saying that there may not be good communitarian--not to mention liberal!--arguments against granting legitimacy to any number of different orders of popular and national collective expressions; I am simply saying that there seems no reason to ignore the possible legitimacy of any such from Milbank's point of view. Certainly it can't be that modern nationalist and populist movements are automatically capitalist; if anything, today's liberal globalist elites--the visionaries of a flat, homogenized, single-jurisdiction, automatic, atemporal world--for whom Milbank has such obvious contempt are exactly the people who see socialist, nationalist, and populist movements as near-identical threats to their dream of a borderless market polity, which really ought to get him thinking about who his allies actually are.)

Milbank ought to investigate the work of those political scientists and economists who talk about the globe's "new medievalist" future, wherein sovereign power will be so dispersed along disparate economic, political, cultural and religious bodies that the world will begin to resemble the feudal arrangements of the high Middle Ages. This, of course, is not guarantee that such an arrangement will involve great socio-economic participation, cooperation, and reciprocity; it may instead result in the proliferations of ever-more fractured and thus ever-more tyrannically impersonal bureaucracies. But, properly constituted, one could see the eclipse of state power--which, of course, could happen both within states as well as between them, depending on how reforms towards greater socio-economic equality and participatory democracy proceed--as introducing a vacuum into which religious and cultural bodies could step, therefore allowing for the development of polities which recognize religious and transcendent claims as part of their multifaceted constitutional structure(s). This, of course, will not be possible in a world in which a Manichean political conception of the individual against all, with the state as both absolute power and absolute threat, and all other elements of civil association marginalized as mere "private" helps to individuals, reigns supreme; in focusing our attention on this, the crucial obstacle to an economy of gifts becoming the socially transformative and politically necessary complement to a Christian polity, Milbank's essay, whatever its flaws, serves an important purpose. But what is even more important is to recognize that there are tools available to work towards the theological politics which Milbank assumes (rightly, I think) a belief in the Kingship of Christ to make incumbent upon Christians like myself.

On Judicial Intervention; or, What Canada Could Learn from Arkansas

First up: Chaoulli v. Quebec.

A Canadian court case of health care would seem unlikely to attract much attention in the U.S., and of course it hasn't. But that's unfortunate, because this very controversial decision by the Supreme Court of Canada--striking down a Quebec law which prohibited the purchasing of private insurance for publicly funded medical procedures--has important public policy and legal/political theory implications, ones that are both suggestive of and can be productively informed by similar debates in the U.S. Insofar as public policy goes, the clearest implication is that the traditional route which different Canadian provinces have provided health care to their citizens--namely, by subscribing to a strict single-payer system, where all medical costs are convered through a universal and mandatory government insurance plan, and wherein private alternatives are circumscribed so to prevent the usual collective action problems--has just received a serious constitutional reproach. Exactly how serious a reproach is not entirely clear, and may not be for a while; only three justices out of six went so far as to claim that the delays in receiving medical attention experienced by the plaintiffs in the Chaoulli case amounted to a violation of the "security of the person" mandated by section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Still, for the nation's highest court to overturn efforts to block the development of an extensive a two-tiered health care arrangement in Canada on the basis on the individual's right to receive a certain level of care, however defined, almost certainly means the pressure to accept such a private-public mix of health care provision will increase. To some, this is catastrophic; to others, it's simply common sense. This is the opinion of Scott Lemieux as well--he agrees that the Quebec law in question was a bad one. But he still thinks the Chaoulli decision sets a terrible precedent, because of what it suggests for future judicial involvement in the health care debate in Canada. And this brings us to the legal and theoretical implications, which I agree are both significant and worrisome.

I have an old and close friend, James Meloche, who works on health policy issues in Ontario, and while he has far more policy concerns about the Chaoulli decision than Scott does, he agrees that the biggest problems are on the constitutional end. This is how he put it in an e-mail to me:

I haven't decided completely on my view of expanding private care in our system--there are positives and huge risks at the same time. But I do have a negative bias to the nature of this ruling, however. While the court decision was dressed up in the language of any legal decision, make no mistake--it was a political and policy decision. At its center was [the question of whether] the entrance of a vibrant private service-delivery system would undermine the viability of public Medicare, and result in other issues of equity. Government lawyers argued in the positive, but the court (4-3) disagreed. Examining the evidence, the court ruled there to be no link between "prohibiting private insurance and maintaining quality public health care." [Some of them] went on to claim that the public system is failing to deliver reasonable medical services in a timely way, thus affecting the Charter guarantee of the "security of the person." Here is where they turn political/policy questions into questions about "rights"....This decision was not on whether public health care was unconstitutional, rather only the perceived "underperformance" of that system to deliver timely care. It attacks the public system from its underbelly to result in a slow death. But what of other policy frameworks that are underpeforming--will courts make decision regarding welfare, law enforcement, etc., on a performance basis?...In this decision, the Canadian political spectrum has been turned upside down. Conservatives who decried both bans on private health care and judicial activism, have found that the latter has delivered the former. Persons on the left who hold Medicare as sacrosanct with individual rights and were never afraid to use the courts to push the boundaries of social policy, have found themselves the victims of their own activist success. And on the party scene, we now have a prime minister considering the use of the "notwithstanding clause" and ignore the court's decision, but having to come to grips that he successfully pinned the leader of the opposition Conservative party as enemy of the Charter because of his willingness to use the notwithstanding to overrule the courts decision on gay marriage. For the Prime Minister, gay marriage was about "rights" and the Charter, stupid. Now for the Conservatives, private health care too is about "rights" and the Charter. What a tangled web we weave.

I tend to believe that such entanglements almost inevitably follow whenever issues of communal or public concern get framed by "rights talk" as matters of individual interest. That's not to say that individuals don't have legitimate interests; of course they do. It's just that the language of rights is by definition interventionary; it involves a presumption that there exists an individual who has a standing separate from whatever historical or collective laws and traditions make up their social context, thus allowing for that individual to turn around and judge that context. Consequently, rights talk is invariably judicial talk, a strategy of breaking up whatever communal arrangements exist in a given time and place in favor of an abstracted "right" or set of rights assumed, by definition, to adhere in most any individual simply by virtue of their ability to claim them. The right to contract is the perfect example of such--a guarantee based on the assumption that if two people consent to make an exchange regarding this or that particular bit of service or property, it is superior to most every other social aim which might be affected by such service or property. (This is why Scott compares the Chaoulli decision to Lochner v. New York.) This kind of communitarian complaint isn't anything new, of course, and I'm overdrawing it as well. Nonetheless, that's the core of what takes place whenever someone makes an argument on the basis of their right to certain level or kind or degree of treatment: an intervention which ursurps the power of existing institutions and procedures, subjecting whatever collective determinations they may have popularly or historically arrived at to a test which may have had nothing to do with original consensus whatsoever.

This isn't a blanket condemnation of judicial review and intervention; I'm not coming out against Brown v. Board of Education here. Modern politics cannot help but involve certain interventionary principles--as I wrote months ago in a different context, "we are the inheritors of a tradition of thinking which posits the possibility, and the appropriateness, of ideology-formation and ideological action, actions which run against tradition, habit, and yes, affective feeling....[w]e can, in short, imagine ourselves as capable of judging our particularities, and we do; we long have and ought to continue to intervene in various particularities in the name of imagined universals." Moreover, those universals ought to be written into documents--like the Declaration of Independence, or the Canadian Charter--so that the matter of aspiring to them can become a material part of our civic lives. The problem comes when the aspiration becomes disconnected from the participatory, political process wherein those aspirations are manifest. They don't really exist outside of the expressive work of consensus-building. That's why the work of Martin Luther King and other civil rights workers, both in and out of political office, to construct a new social and political understanding of racial justice in America was far more important than what the Warren Court decided (and even then, they were far from entirely successful in their efforts to address the bitter, alienating consequences of that judicial intervention). It's not simple stubbornness that leads people like Nathan Newman to lambast both the Chaoulli decision and judicial review in general; he's right that, far more often than not, the people who benefit from the sort of rights talk--like that of the "security of the person"--which brings courts into conflict with legislative determinations over "performance" are usually either wealthy enough, iconoclastic enough, or uncivic-minded enough so as to fail to recognize the collective (and frequently egalitarian) dimension and requirements of whatever it was the community in question was trying to "perform" in the first place. There are many exceptions to that judgment, and it may be a little unfair--but then again, it also a not inaccurate description of Jacques Chaoulli himself.

The situation in Canada puts me in mind of various entanglements which anyone who has lived in Arkansas over the past decade or so is likely very familiar with. Arkansas is a poor state, with a limited property tax base; it is also a state that, in a admirable fit of progressive aspiration, committed in its state constitution to "maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." This has been interpreted as a primary civic responsibility--and consequently, a source for litigation. Back in 1992, Lake View School District, a tiny, all-black and impoverished district in Arkansas's southeast Delta, brought suit against the state, alleging that under then-current funding arrangements there was no way Lake View students could receive the sort of education the state presumably guaranteed to provide. This inspired a long series of decisions and reversals (which I wrote about some here), at the end of which the Arkansas Supreme Court held the state government's feet to the fire, demanding that changes be made in both how much the state spends on education and how it is distributed. Governor Huckabee made the controversial decision to consolidate Arkansas's smaller school districts--including, ironically but not surprisingly, Lake View itself--as part of a new funding formula, in order to better pool and deliver the state's available educational resources. While I was bothered by how Huckabee sold his plan, and was bothered even more by the condescending language which the state's political elite used against rural educators who strove to defend the borders of their districts, I thought Huckabee's decision was the right one, primarily because it was an honest attempt to accept the new, post-intervention requirements of Arkansas's own constitutional polity, and make the changes necessary to incorporate those requirements into a collective arrangement that would return the dispute to democratic debate and the public sphere. The crucial matter was to make the court's decision part of new (but not lacking in continuity) social arrangement, rather than allowing the state's schoolchildren to continue to tread water in an educational environment increasingly characterized more by resentment and withdrawal than common concern; he wasn't wholly successful, but his efforts were admirable nonetheless. Unfortunately, judicial genies like these can almost never be put back into the bottle; just a few days ago, the Arkansas Supreme Court once again re-opened the Lake View case, appointing "special masters" to report back to the court as to whether the legislature's efforts meet up with their fiats. How it will end, or if it will ever end, is an open question.

The lesson, if there is a simple one to draw, is that judicial intervention, as necessary as it may be in order to correct and establish the grounds of political action, in practice often rides very hard on serious efforts to collectively engage in such action. Again, that's not to say it's never worth it; I wish Governor Riley in Alabama had been successful last year in his efforts to overturn segregationist language in their state constitution, and establish a general right (and civic obligation) to public education there, even though those opponents who feared the lawsuits which would have inevitably followed clearly had a point. But the fact is, it can backfire, as it clearly has in Canada (at least as far as those in favor of the current health care regime are concerned). It may be that this decision was unavoidable; as Tom Hurka comments in a Crooked Timber thread on this debate, the "security of the person" claim has been used to sustain an individual right to a certain level of "performance" in medical care--in this case, the provision of abortion services--since at least the 1988 Morgentaler decision that struck down Canada's then-existing (sometimes restrictive) abortion laws. If one happens to applaud that decision as an extension of individual rights, then it would suggest that similar applause must be due to Chaoulli, since it also simply insists that the state cannot shape the provision of medical care in accordance with anything that does not meet the rights, needs, and contractual interests of individual Canadians. As a fan of Canada's egalitarian vision of health care as a public good, but also as an agnostic on the superiority of a single-payer vs. a two-tier system, I have no definite ideas as to how the Canadian Parliament or the different provinces should respond to Chaoulli--except to say that I hope their political leaders can help articulate a new (but not absolutely new) collective arrangement, one that will, if necessary, shape whatever two-tier compromises which may emerge from this and likely future lawsuits as part of a political process that all can feel equally commitmented to. If they fail to do that, then it will only become easier for the people of Canada to look at provincial and national failures to live up to presumed judicial decrees and assume that, well, health really must be just a personal look-out after all. In the U.S., the struggle to reform the public education system (in Arkansas, and everywhere else) so prevent that mentality from overtaking the public consensus entirely is a difficult one, and we're a long ways away (and getting further all the time) from being able to do anything even remotely similar insofar as health care is concerned. It'd be a great loss if, one way or another, our better example to the north were to be lost.

Back from the Prairie

Yes, once again it's been a while. I really should stop making promises regarding when I'm going to blog, and how much, and about what, since I so rarely keep any of them. Perhaps it's a sign of constant hopefulness on my part. Or maybe I just, on some level, like feeling guilty.

Among other distractions, the last couple of weeks included a trip to Macomb, Illinois, and my first visit to the campus of Western Illinois University. We drove there to look for a place to live, primarily, but also to check our the surroundings. All we did, really, was head pretty much straight north along the Mississippi River, so while some of the natural environment changed as left the Delta and entered the Upper Mississippi--more hills, fewer floodplains--the most visible differences were man-made: huge fields of corn rather than cotton, groves of trees instead of rice fields. Once you're north of the Ohio River Valley and St. Louis, you really do enter America's prairie land--though, being on the east side of the Mississippi, Macomb is more "on the edge of the prairie," to borrow Garrison Keillor's Minnesotan phrase. I wish I could say that Macomb reminded us of Lake Wobegone, but that wasn't the case; Melissa said afterwards that she was hoping to discover a quaint little compact Midwestern farming town, but there probably aren't any such left (that is, assuming such things ever existed in the first place). Instead, we found pretty much what our years in Arkansas have taught us to expect from small towns today: a fairly random collection of neighborhoods, more or less bounded by a few big box stores--Wal-Mart and its kin--along the nearest couple of state highways. In truth, Macomb actually has much more of a old-fashioned "downtown" than most such towns; we visited the farmer's market, which was small but well-stocked, and had to acknowledge that there was actually a surprising amount of space available for pedestrian traffic and commerce. Also, thanks to WIU, Macomb also has something of a bus system, which is a huge step up from Jonesboro (where a few dedicated folks have been trying in vain to make some sort of public transportation option available for years). So Macomb has a decent amount of civic appeal, don't get me wrong; I think we'll enjoy living there, especially given the nice neighborhood we rented a house in. But we'll hardly be escaping the usual fate of small, rural cities in America, those that aren't nearly large enough to pull in metropolitan amenities, but are large enough to warrant the appearance of the lowest common denominator type of retail giants. We've dealt with it before, and we'll deal with it again. (And hopefully we'll have more options for fresh produce and foodstuffs there than we've had around here.)

On the other hand, one thing we will definitely miss about Jonesboro is the absence of taverns and bars. Craighead is a dry county, and for all the complaining that prompts (such as regards its impact on restaurant availability, a complaint Melissa and I are hardly innocent of), I'm convinced there's an important good achieved through such a policy. Besides removing a major source of urban blight, it also means for a university town that a good chunk of the student population doesn't collectively relocate to a bunch of ugly, beer-drenched dives from about Thursday night through early Sunday morning--a result apparently not unknown to Macomb, though WIU clearly isn't that much of a party school. Ah well. Before we move, I'll have to write a tribute to the benefits of living in a Baptist town.

We'll be leaving town again next week, and we'll be gone through July 4th, after which I'll be back to teach my last class at ASU, the politics and the movies one I've been talking about. Actually, I think I may end up writing about some of our class discussions here (oops, there's another promise to be broken). In the meantime, there's a lot of news and ideas I've been meaning to blog about, so I hereby declare this catch-up week. Let's see how I do.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today...

...well, not exactly 40 years ago today. But it was 40 years ago, in 1965, that the world of pop music changed--you might say, turned a corner, or came into its own.

Sometime last week, I popped The Beatles' Rubber Soul into the CD player at the office. How many times have I listened to that record? Twenty, fifty, a hundred? Anyway, it was in the background: "Drive My Car," then "Norwegian Wood." And then "You Won't See Me"--just another Beatles love song, one that has never, to my knowledge, received much analysis or praise. Yet, somehow, it commanded my attention, right from the opening lines:

When I call, you up
Your line's engaged
I have had, enough
So act your age

And I thought: what a perfectly wonderful lyric. What a perfectly wonderful melody. What a perfectly wonderful little song. And that's really the whole story of pop music, isn't it? The catch, the hook, the chord change and turn of phrase, that somehow makes the whole thing a work of art--disposable art, perhaps, something profoundly synthetic, repeatable, contained. But art nonetheless.

I sometimes play around with friends about what "pop music" means. If it has any meaning besides that which record companies want to give it for marketing purposes (and maybe it doesn't), then that meaning probably resides in the idea that there are certain artistic conventions that are "popular"--not in the sense of necessarily appealing to the whole population (because what could ever do that?), but in the sense of being accessible to mass dissemination and consumption. Big, sprawling, demanding works of music and art, ones that depend upon innumerable circumstances and variables, can't ever be "popular" in this sense, though certainly some can have a lot more fans and attract a lot more attention that others. (Think opera, for example: there's no opera that can or ever could be described as "pop music," though clearly La Bohème is a lot more popular than, say, Elektra.) Real pop music only emerged when there was developed the sort of technology (both human and mechanical) for musicians and other artists to produce work that could be performed and reproduced in a reliable way. That doesn't mean pop music was a completely modern phenomenon; you could, perhaps, argue that a lot of chamber music was "pop music," particularly in the hands of a master like Mozart (think of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, or other such pieces: Mozart, in writing such music, didn't really innovate, but simply wrote the same way everybody else was writing...only he did it, within those limited conventions, better than anybody else at the time could). But broadly speaking, it was only with the 20th century--after Gilbert and Sullivan, after the rise of Tin Pan Alley, with the radio revolution--that we really began to see "pop music" as a separate musical form. The four-minute song (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus...), the back-up band, the singer and songwriter: all settled into a well-established groove, and its easy dominance shaped (to the fury of many musicologists and preservationists ever since) much of whatever country, bluegrass, blues and folk music managed to make it into the recording studio in the decades which followed. (Classical music went its own way, while jazz, for a while at least, managed to be an occasional exception.) The majority of the music made by both Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley shared a similar "pop" architecture, however radically different their sounds.

And then...The Beatles. I like how Colby Cosh put it in this column a while back:

There are a lot of things people haven't quite absorbed about the Beatles. I remember being dumbstruck by a passage in Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head, which, incidentally, has no credible rival as the best book ever written about rock music. Macdonald paints us a scene of the Beatles' earliest days as celebrities, after they'd just migrated to London. We meet two promising young performers whose blues-influenced band has just been signed to a contract: a Mr. Mick Jagger and a Mr. Keith Richards. They've swung by the studio to exchange pleasantries and watch the northern quartet at work. They watch as McCartney and Lennon, equipped with a chorus and a verse they've worked on earlier, try to stitch things together with a middle eight, messing around on a piano. In maybe fifteen minutes of banter and tinkling, they've knitted a few chords into a future hit. This is all completely foreign to Mick and Keef, and as they watch, the penny drops. They realize that a person who can play an instrument can write a song. There's no magic to it--no massive leather-bound manual locked in a Brill Building safe that tells you how to do it. It hadn't occurred to them that there could be such an animal as a rock-and-roll group that wrote its own songs.

Of course, it's not as straightforward as all that. Lots of innovations were always rippling through the pop music ocean; there was always tension and critical standards and expectations being overturned. Even in terms of rock-and-roll, this story is incomplete; as Colby notes, MacDonald forgets that Buddy Holly was breaking all the rules that the Beatles broke back when they were still all individually listening to skiffle music. But still, there it is--sometime in the middle of the 1960s, the whole pop music world was re-oriented, pop music became the province of those who were themselves caught up in extant musical currents, rather than those who were standing somewhere to the side of it; pop music was released from its "industrialized vial," in Colby's words.

When was the big moment? Why not make it 1965? In 1965 the Beatles kicked off their U.S. tour playing Shea Stadium, the biggest (and loudest) rock concert ever up until that point, a concert that the Beatles later looked back on as a turning point: when it was all over, they retreated to the studio, never to tour again (though Paul wanted to). In 1965 they released Help!, the last Beatles album to feature a song they didn't write themselves, with a couple of sublime Lennon/McCartney gems hinting at what was to come: "Ticket to Ride," and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." And then of course in 1965 they released Rubber Soul, with--besides what I've already mentioned--"Nowhere Man," "Drive My Car," "Michelle," and "In My Life." After that year, perhaps, one could really say that the Beatles had changed the world. Certainly they'd changed almost everything about what was taken to be accepted about pop music--about the relation between singer and songwriter, about the role of the studio and recording technology, about what an "authentic" performance consists of, about what you can get away with on the radio--and changed it for good. They didn't write and record the most important or powerful pop music of the 1960s, but they did write and record just about all the best pop songs, and that's enough.

Once, after VH1 or somebody had come out with another one of their ridiculous "Top 100 albums of All Time" lists, I got into one of those predictable arguments with some friends, about what Beatles albums should go where. I ended up suggesting that every such top 100 list should simply leave about five of the top ten slots open, with the words "insert the post-1964 Beatles' album of your choice here." That would just about do it. They may not be your favorite, you may not care for any of their songs, but you've been influenced by them nonetheless. I doubt anyone who has listened to or made any pop music anywhere in Europe or America (or elsewhere!) anytime in the last 40 years can plausibly claim otherwise.

Hermeneutics, Naivete, and the Politics of Truth

My post on Ricoeur has inspired an exchange between myself and an old friend, Damon Linker. It's an exchange which arises from both a disagreemen over certain elements of the history of philosophy, and a disagreement over what it means to make an affirmation, particularly a religious affirmation. In other words, it's about truth and how we moderns--as opposed to those who came before us--recognize and affirm it, and whether Ricoeurian hermeneutics provides (or at least points toward) an answer to this problem or merely distracts us from the heart of the puzzle. I'm going to excerpt one small part of Damon's valuable criticisms, and try to build from that a response that I hope will elaborate a little more clearly some of which I posted on yesterday.

Damon wrote:

What I detect in your hermeneutical tradition is the longing to recapture that "naive" (Riceour's phrase, remember) experience of pre-reflective/pre-critical experience on the far side of Enlightenment skepticism, which it holds to be purely "negative" in the sense that it negates this pre-critical experience by showing its inevitable dependence upon active subjectivity, which produces epistemological relativism and psychological despair or melancholy. Only the "negation of the negation" can lead self-conscious men and women to overcome this impasse and achieve a reconciliation -- i.e., allow someone . . . to be both intensely skeptical and critical while ALSO affirming something analogous to the pre-reflective experience of pure faith.

In replying to Damon, I find myself trying to get clear on what hermeneutic thinkers like Ricoeur (and myself) are actually claiming when we talk about "naivete." Many of the usual histories of hermeneutics talk about it as a product of romanticism or the Counter-Enlightenment; of thinkers like Dilthey, Schleiermacher and others who were working through what Kantian Idealism, and its proposed resolution to the problems of modernity, meant for the study of the social or "human" sciences (Geisteswissenshaften). Short history of modern thought made even shorter: Descartes, Locke and others gave us a model of knowing which rejected the presumptions of medieval Christendom, insisting that naming a thing was a matter of mentally picturing it, not relating to it in reference to a divine, encompassing world or telos; subsequent modern thinkers--like Hume--pointed out that this kind of empirical picturing, methodologically powerful as it may be, implies that the subject and the object are not just profoundly but categorically separated, leaving us without any basis for "knowledge" except our own sentimental habits and preferences; Kant responded to this critique by taking up the idea of categories and positing the subject as an entity wholly and solely concerned with the phenomenal one, or the world of appearances in other words, with morality and all other normative claims being a function of a practical reflection upon the categorical limits of knowability itself: this is the Idealist or "critical" turn in philosophy. Hermeneutics supposedly comes to the fore at this point; with Kant definitively separating dogmatic metaphysical claims from critical claims of knowledge, all that remains is to work out how we interpret the phenomena which appear before us. So far, so good. In a world where the subject is understood to be distinct from the objects it seeks to know, then all that is left for the subject to do is to try to figure out the best way to clarify and interpret its own (limited and inward) pictures of those objects, and that makes the work of descriptive clarification and interpretation--of texts, in particular--paramount.

But after Nietzsche, it became very difficult for all these interpreters (working as they were in the wake of both Kant and Descartes) to explain how matters of power and perspective weren't structured into their every description of a given text or appearancee from the get-go. Early phenomenologists like Husserl hoped to get around this problem by rethinking the emphasis of the critical tradition entirely: knowability (and hence the "moral law within" which Kant held could be constructed on the basis of his response to the subject/object dichotomy) ought to be understood, they argued, as a function of "the things themselves," meaning that the focus of philosophical study ought not to be our consciousness of appearances, but how that thing which appears impacts upon our consciousness. Then came Heidegger, who exploded this whole approach by pointing out that things only "appear" against a field of some kind--and what followed, of course, was the whole revival of ontology, the questioning of the "metaphysics of knowledge" which had been (unconsciously?) buried beneath the Kantian enterprise from the start, the "call of Being," and all the rest. Which resulted in an interesting transformation of hermeneutics, one carried out by such people as Ricoeur (who had spent his years in a WWII German POW camp reading German philosophy, believe it or not): hermeneutics, which was presumed to be a kind of romantic method, was turned against method itself (insofar as "method" meant addressing the subject/object distinction, or the fact/value distinction if you prefer, in an essentially empirical way). This "new" philosophical hermeneutics presented itself as actually dependent upon a much older understanding of subjectivity, one which has deep roots in Christian and Western thought, one which (arguably) certain early Romantics (like J.G. Herder) turned to not because it provided a theory of understanding which accommodated the importance of subjective interpretation in making knowledge and truth claims, but because it echoed older understandings of truth, wherein knowledge was held to be something uncovered or illuminated by and through the subject matter itself. (This is plain when you look into the pneumatological roots of Geisteswissenshaften itself.) In other words, it involved (or at least should have been understood to involve) "believing in order to understand"--a concept which goes back to St. Paul, if not earlier.

What does this have to do with naivete? What it means is that, from Ricoeur's point of view, what is being sought through his kind of philosophical or "anthropological" hermeneutics, through a "wagering" of belief upon the actual (historical, natural, linguistic) conditions or "field" or "horizon" of our interpretive work in the world, is not a return to wholly precritical, prereflective belief. According to this argument, Augustine and all the rest were fully aware of their own subjectivity; the fact that you can find evidence of this awareness all through the medieval period, in the context of debates over the status of knowledge (nominalism, negative theology, etc.), is just additional support for the argument. Hence, the "naivete" which Ricoeur spoke of wasn't a belief that existed without interpretation--after all, the symbols which ancient and medieval believers took up as meaningfully related to the world nonetheless had to be connected to that world through an act of evaluation, though an evaluation which included the person as well as the symbol itself. So Ricoeur is not imagining that there is some way to overcome the subject entirely; the notion that anyone ever did hold to such nonreflective beliefs is a straw man. Thus I think that when Damon doubts the ability of Ricoeurian hermeneutics to get one "back to" the "experience of pure faith," he's imaging faith in terms of Cartesian presumptions, one in which subjective reflection is of course complete different from cognitive correspondence, and that's a faith that I sincerely doubt any serious person has ever entertained.

Some have argued that hermeneutic thinkers like Ricoeur, Gadamer, Taylor and others reject the correspondence theory of truth; I think this is incorrect. What their hermeneutical/philosophical anthropology does do is reject those modern presumptions about the mode of correspondence which drove Kant to conclude that knowledge and morality couldn't draw any force or support from the noumenal, "actual" world. That is, what I see them as doing is rejecting a strictly scientific, "mediational" or representational epistemology, in all of its forms. Under this hermeneutic model, "truth" does not follow from the correspondence of a mental picture (or formula, or methodologically obtained data point) to the appearance of a thing, since it is necessary to also concomitantly evaluate one's relationship to the space of the thing's appearance. But that evaluative relationship is a matter of correspondence--to tradition, to intuition, to prior beliefs which themselves were constructed in the context of a received space or horizon of recognition, and so forth. How this evaluation works, and whether or not it issues in defensible truth claims, is at the heart of the matter. But whatever else it may be, it is not a claim that somehow we can dismiss with a subject-that-corresponds entirely, since there is no believing which isn't at least partly a function of an understanding which assumes some sort of interpretive correspondence.

(Perhaps the misunderstanding here is the fault of Hegel. From within Hegel's philosophy, earlier notions of subjectivity and interpretation--that is, the kind of notions which philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes--truly were marginal, but that is because they (again, from Hegel's point of view) put the cart before the horse: they assumed the priority and presence of the world over and through one's perspective of it. Whereas Hegel insisted that the only solution to the dilemma of modernity and the division of the subjective self from the objective world it gave birth to was (in contrast to Kant's solution of delineating and attaching great importance to the specifics of those resulting divisions) to discover (or impose) a grand unitary spiritual logic within the subjective perspective itself. Whatever historically turned out to be rational would be real, the real data, itself. A brilliant philosophical creation, maybe the greatest in history, but still one which confronts the terms which Descartes set. And the hermeneutic tradition (which Hegel liberally borrowed from, but otherwise had little interest in) makes the claim that it is the Cartesian analysis of subjectivity is what's flawed, not the responses to it. So hermeneutics isn't, I think, trying to get away from a "common sense" understanding of truth, since supposedly for moderns the only way to rescue such sensibility today is to go the route of Hegelian absolutism; rather, they're trying to think again through what modernity defined as the requirements of common sense knowledge in the first place.)

If all this is true, why does Ricoeur talk about a "second naivete," one which is only possible through a kind of "hermeneutics of faith" (as opposed to a "hermeneutics of suspicion")? Well, because while the subject has always been with us, modernity has changed our accounting of subjectivity; whereas in premodern times the "subject" which participated in the interpretation of truth was broader (both spatially and temporally) than a single person, modernity has made possible a thinking about ourselves as apart from the field of evaluation, as independently capable evaluators. And so the old naivete--which Isaiah Berlin, borrowing from Friedrich Schiller, once called a lack of consciousness about the "rifts in one's milieu"--won't do any longer. It's the difference between someone who has only ever been immersed in a single musical tradition--because their identity is concurrent to that tradition--making distinctions between good and bad musical expressions of one's tradition, and someone who has been introduced to a plurality of musical traditions, and now must make such distinctions with an understanding that the evaluative criteria provided by their own believed tradition itself can also be evaluated. This is why identity and recognition have come to play such a huge role in the thinking of these philosophers; figuring out how to account and defend the existence of the interpretive self in the context of what they hold to be manifest demands for belief is no easy task. So now we have to "wager" on interpretation; we have to use it self-consciously and therefore critically, whereas before the presence of the individual subject wasn't crucial to how subjective evaluations were performed.

Clearly, this doesn't satisfy a lot of people. On the one hand, who have people like Rorty and others who simply think that the efforts of hermeneutical thinkers to preserve any difference whatsoever between the content of a thing and our evaluation of it is pointless; there's just the subjective will, they say, and that's all. On the other hand, there are people like my friend Damon (unless I am profoundly misunderstanding him, which is always possible--that's the burden of interpretation, after all), who continue to suspect that all this talk about intuition and illumination and tradition in the context of religious belief is a dodge; that it's a way to play at "meaningfulness" when one can no longer really ascribe normative force to claims that can be contested by the fact of pluralism. And this is where you can see a political point to this highly philosophical debate. The most common "political" accusation lobbed at hermeneutic thinkers like Ricoeur (as Scott McLemee humorously implied yesterday) is that they are "conservative" in denial: that their philosophy amounts to a reactive attachment to religion, tradition, and the status quo, but without any open or straightforward endorsement of such, thereby undermining the possibility of critical thought and progress by default. The most common accusation lobbed against communitarian thinkers (by both liberals and conservatives) is that they are engaged in a kind of cheap nostalgia: that they want to invest society with the sort of meaningfulness that religion and tradition can provide, but without actually embracing the (presumably reactionary) truth claims which would meaningfulness possible. There is no necessary connection between these two sets of thinkers, except this: both want to affirm the possibility of finding in our present, supposedly "self-interpreted" moment, a continuation of collective meanings that have a hold on our claims and our actions. Such a possibility would imply both that 1) the ethical horizon of any politics is a function of a polity's "meaning-full" historical identity; and 2) the meaning of that historical identity of a polity is not static, but is instead constituted by a continuum of interpretive links in an always-manifest chain. So, yes, as the democratic theorist Sheldon Wolin once put it, modern politics is characterized by "the presence of the past" (and, as Richard Bernstein once suggested, there's much which Wolin and other radical thinkers share with supposedly conservative hermeneutic philosophers: specifically, a rejection of an epistemologically mandated restriction in what counts as meaningful political action). The point is to vivify and draw from that past; not set it aside as something which cannot provide conclusions which fit modernity's peculiarly "demonstrable" criteria for what works, for what is true.

Happily nihilistic pragmatists/liberals like Rorty say not to worry about contingency. More admirably, modern-day Kantian liberals like Rawls and Habermas try to justify a politics of strict criteria and method in the face of post-Heideggerian doubts. Other liberals reject both options, but continue to contend that the modern fact of pluralism constitutes a crucial obstacle to the individual affirmation of collective religious truth--and obstacle which I think they also hope can be taken up as a bulwark against religious conservatives who are often themselves simple-mindedly Cartesian about their own political aims. Philosophical hermeneutics, with its hopeful politics of intuition and affirmation, does risk becoming entryway for such conservatives into the liberal order; that is certainly true. But I don't think such avoiding such "naive" wager is worth it if it means not looking to see if, beneath all the method, there isn't a history to our polity and our selves that we can believe in.

Thoughts on Ricoeur

Via the invaluable Political Theory Daily Review comes the news that Paul Ricoeur has passed away. (Though, now that I scan the web, it's clear that Nathaniel Robinson and Anthony Paul Smith caught this new fresh over the weekend.) He was 92, a wonderfully advanced age, though still 10 years shy of that reached by the philosopher of hermeneutics so often linked with Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Is there something to be learned from the fact that more than a few of the leading lights of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics have lived such long and productive lives? Probably, though I've no clear sense of what that lesson may be.

When I wrote my tribute to Jacques Derrida last year, I aligned my sympathies with those thinkers--like Ricoeur, Gadamer, Charles Taylor, and others--who see the moral and political task implied by the phenomenological response to Nietzsche's critique of modernity as an "anthropological" rather than a "deconstructive" one. That is, I think that rather than, through the interplay of presumably always fallible human perspectives, intensifying (and thereby perhaps--hopefully?--discovering contingent ethical resources in the midst of) the now-exposed vacuum left by modernity's withdrawal from ontological commitments under the cover of science and rationalism, I take our task to be one of discerning the "strong," perhaps even metaphysical, underpinings of human subjectivity itself, and by so articulating them, concurrently investing them with greater force: as Nicholas H. Smith put it in Strong Hermeneutics, the aim is to "undertake a leveling up of identity-expressive, normative beliefs to cognitive status." This is done by shifting the philosophical project away from "the epistemological fragility of foundational truth claims" and towards the more anthropological "conditions of possibility of actual interpretive practices"--which means one's place in history and nature, of course, but most especially one's linguistic situatedness. Thinkers like Ricoeur believed phenomenology turned entirely upon "a recognition of the capacity of language to disclose domains of reality which constitute the independently subsisting subject matter of [all] competing interpretations" (SH, 1997, pgs. 19, 22, italics added). Depending on how one looks at it, this isn't so much a strengthening of subjectivity as it is an affirmation of purposefully "weak" revisions in traditional ontological thinking. But however the project is framed, it's a vital one, and Ricoeur's contributions to it have been enormous. Indeed, for many thinkers Ricoeur, far more than Gadamer, was the central figure in hermeneutic thinking--perhaps because Gadamer mostly grounded his thought in ancient Greek philosophy and applied his philosophy mostly to narrow issues in the humanities, whereas Ricoeur engaged those intellectual fields where questions of hermeneutics have been more broadly accepted: psychology, Biblical criticism, legal thought, moral philosophy, and much more.

Ricoeur was, and remains, one of those philosophers about whom I always told myself that I would eventually get around to reading more of. He's in good company in that category--I should also read more Rawls, Kierkegaard, Hume, etc.--but he stands apart from them nonetheless, if only because wrestling with Ricoeur's ideas about what it means to identify oneself through the articulation of a belief, and thereby come to an understanding of the normative purchase which a belief has upon oneself, is of tremendous importance to a religious believer like myself. Ricoeur made plain the stakes for modern believers nearly 40 years ago, in his powerful study of the problem of evil (or rather, the problem of understanding it), The Symbolism of Evil. After having exhaustively considered the way in which modern thought teaches us to comprehend everything as solely a cognitive marker, a symbol bereft of meaning besides that which we ascribe to it, and the way in which phenomenology can potentially return us to the actual meaning of symbols, Ricoeur concludes:

"In every way, something has been lost, irremediably lost: immediacy of belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second naivete in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again . . . [T]he second immediacy that we seek and the second naivete that we await are no longer accessible to us anywhere else than in a hermeneutics; we can only believe by interpreting. . . . [Some interpretation merely means] to display the multiple and inexhaustible intentions of each symbol, to discover intentional analogies between myths and rites, to run through the levels of experience and representation that are unified by the symbol. . . . Our analysis of the symbols and myths of human evil belongs to that sort of understanding . . . But is has not been possible to limit ourselves to such understanding of symbols [by way of other] symbols. There the question of truth is unceasingly eluded. Although the phenomenologist may give the name of truth to the internal coherence, the systematicity, of the world of symbols, such truth is truth without belief, truth at a distance, reduced, from which one has expelled the question: do I believe that? . . . Such is the wager. Only he can object to this mode of thought who thinks that philosophy, to begin from itself, must be a philosophy without presuppositions [that is, something that disconnects cognition from worldhood, something that refuses to recognize the anthropological]. A philosophy that starts from the fullness of language is a philosophy with presuppositions [or, with meaningful conditions to its own subjectivity]. To be honest, it must make its presuppositions explicit, state them as beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding" (SE, 1967, pgs. 352-354, 357).

There are interesting puzzles which will probably always plague this kind of wagering on belief, perhaps the greatest being the degree to which one can clarify what it means for a presumably embedded self to nonetheless affirm the results of such a "naive," interpretive wager. Is critique possible; can we pull ourselves out of our environments and judge our own convictions? If it is not possible, what is the point of speaking of the value of individual belief at all? Our "beliefs," or lack of them, would therefore be entirely in the hands of fate, or God, or some kind of Pinkeresque evolutionary psychology. But if it is possible, then how can anyone ever be clear on the "limits" of said critique, the point at which our own sense of critical subjectivity runs up against an "independently subsisting subject matter" (about what is evil, for example, or immoral or unjust) that shows us where the "domains of reality" believably begin (and end)?

Ricoeur's hermeneutical response builds upon an evaluation of our consciousness of the origin of our own prejudices and their place in our lives as human beings, and thus clearly involves an "attestation of self," wherein the subject's personal (though dialogic) extension into the whole is understood as making it freer, wiser, further along. In this way hermeneutics, and the wagering that through interpretation we can discover that aspect of being which "still speaks to us," is almost wholly a matter of "self-interpretation," or an extension of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "I can" to a higher level. Ricoeur was aware of the solipsism which such a reading of interpretation makes possible. In Oneself as Another, he wrote that "the discourse of the 'I can' is, to be sure, a discourse in I. But the main emphasis is to be placed on the verb, on being-able-to-do, to which corresponds on the ethical plane, being-able-to-judge" (OA, 1992, pg. 181). This willingness to speak of the subject in relation to what is teleologically manifest in our linguistic appropriation of the given makes it possible to think about human freedom, social transformation, and moral innovation in a way which Gadamer, whose communal vision was ultimately somewhat passive, cannot. But it also potentially weakens the idea of a teleological revelation of truth in the event of language--which seems to me to necessarily be the operating ontological presumption behind the strong yet "naive" hermeneutical and linguistic embrace of the details of one's own place in the world in the first place. Heidegger (in whose footsteps all these thinkers tread, more or less) insisted that the fullest expression of that which is manifest through attendance to the conditions of our own existence as subjects is simply that "being speaks." For Ricoeur (in whose writings one could always discern the glimmer of old Marxist hopes), that wasn't enough: it had to be a matter that "being can still speak to me." That is, we can be modern believers and meaningful actors simultaneously; the modern, critical self can still engage the foundations of the world without eschewing that very modernity which allows us to think about the symbols of that foundation as symbols themselves.

To thinkers still committed to the fundamentals of Enlightenment, and to those thinkers who take different lessons from Nietzsche and Heidegger, "naive" is a pitch-perfect description of the hermeneutic project. It is a label that Ricoeur, to his credit, attributed to his writings with pride. Paul Ricoeur, RIP.

(Update: My discussion of Ricoeur, hermeneutics and truth continues here.)

Politics and the Movies: An Update

Thanks to everyone for the many great comments following my post on my plans to build a political theory class around movies this summer. Some excellent, as well as some truly off-the-wall, suggestions. Also, it was gratifying to see so many people willing to use Star Trek episodes to teach political ideas. But then, this is the internet, after all. Let me tell you where my thinking currently stands:

The class is going to open with a discussion of movies and politics, and specifically some of great examples of films inspiring, reflecting, or shaping political discourse in America; if possible, I'm going to show some clips from The Best Years of Our Lives (regarding America's postwar aspirations and supposed ideological "consensus") and Network (dealing, obviously, with the breakdown of such). (Thanks to David Salmanson for suggesting this idea.) Then I'm going to shift into talking about how we want to use films as texts to discuss basic political concepts, after which I'll introduce five general themes that we'll address through written material and films over the following few weeks (the class is only a month long). Right now the primary themes are going to be 1) democracy and populism; 2) violence and the law; 3) technology and freedom; 4) feminism and roles; and 5) conscience and consequentialism. That last is, obviously, a theme by no means particularly suited to a political theory class, but it allowed me to work in two of my favorite films, plus round out last few days of class. With all of these films I'll assign essays dealing with the films themselves, as well as some general political theory material.

In the first section, I plan on showing All the King's Men and Meet John Doe (though the latter will be difficult to get a copy of); the readings will focus on criticisms of democracy, both ancient and modern. Hopefully I'll be able to lead the class towards a discussion of present-day populist claims, as manifest both on the left and the right, maybe working in some stuff about California politics, the role of referendums and initiatives in a representative government, and (assuming it's still going on in July) the argument over filibusters in the U.S. Senate. The second section will include showings of Dirty Harry and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence; of course, the readings there will be from Hobbes and other social contract thinkers, and include some references to contemporary failed states and arguments over sovereignty and international law. The third section is one I'm still puzzling over. I definitely will show Gattaca (it's a great, stylish movie), but I don't know what to pair it with. I'm going to assign readings on genetic engineering and some broader stuff on technology in general, but I can't for the life of me think of any movies that present the "struggle with progress" in anything other than triumph-of-the-human-spirit terms. Simply put, Hollywood doesn't make movies which complicate our dependence upon technology; it's essentially invisible until it starts to actually shape or constrain our dealings with each other, at which point it becomes an enemy to be defeated. (In short, Gattaca, while only about a 100 times better and more subtle, does not take an essentially different approach to the problem of technology than the mostly awful I, Robot.) Any suggestions? I'm strongly tempted to bring in one of my all-time favorites, Brazil, but I'm afraid it may be just too confusing to get any good use out of, and is probably too long to watch in one class period to boot.

For the fourth section, I'll show Thelma & Louise and Adam's Rib. There's a ton of good feminist writing on the former; not as much on the latter, but I decided to focus more narrowly on the way feminism presents different alternatives for dealing with male dominance of the public sphere, rather than looking at power and gender in general, and that meant I needed to find a film which talked about "compromises" between the sexes. Besides, Adam's Rib is the movie Melissa and I watched on our very first date, and so it occupies an important place in my heart for that reason. Finally, to end on a more explicitly ethical and philosophical note, I'll show them Crimes and Misdemeanors and A Man for All Seasons--the latter, of course, being one of the great (if not the greatest) existentialist celebrations of integrity and deontological morality, the former being a superb consideration of consequentialism and the possibility of morality in the absence of a (feared) moral order. I'm going to require them to write a short paper for each section of the class, and I think I may make use of blogging as well; maybe set up a blog for the class where I'll post my lectures and encourage them to continue our discussions outside the classroom.

One theme that I wish I could work into the class, but I just don't think they'll be time for it, is a consideration of borders, and the way in which identity and citizenship is constructed and used politically. That would have allowed me to use Spanglish, a film which I thought was simply fabulous, as well as Lone Star, a film I've never seen but which was praised and recommended by several of those who commented on the previous post. Weirdly though, I just finally got around to seeing the recut version of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, which--besides being a terribly dated but still terrific noir film--I found to be filled with far more and far deeper echoes of and observations about life along the U.S.-Mexico border than I had remembered. A lot of ugly feeling is on stark display in that movie. I wonder if it and Lone Star would make an productive combination? I guess I'll have to rent the latter and find out.

Illinois Bound

Well, the word is getting around, so I may as well announce it here: I've accepted a position at Western Illinois University for the coming academic year. It's an offer we've accepted without fear, I think, but not without some doubt. That is, while we're committed to and happy about our decision, I'm not absolutely sure it's the "right" thing for us to do. After all, we could have stuck around Arkansas State for another year, to see how the search for a theorist in the department goes one more time, and enjoy the small but significant amount of comfort and security we've found for ourselves here in the meantime. As I said last month (and before), I've really come to feel at home here, to care a lot for the fine students and faculty I've been privileged to teach, work with, and learn from, and frankly my family and I (particularly Caitlyn, our five-year-old, whom we've come to realize over the last few days is taking our decision to move away from her friends pretty hard) really don't want to be in the position of chasing after a bunch of unknowns. Unfortunately, as of last month it became clear to us that there were far more unknowns still lurking around here than we had previously thought. So we looked around for some other one-year possibilities, to measure against the one remaining for us here. WIU made an offer, and after counting up all the respective arguments both for and against the move (which really just ended up just canceling each other out, as is so often the case), we came to the point that we simply needed to make a decision: stick with the unknowns immediately before us, or take a chance on those new unknowns over there? We made the latter choice, and feel good about it. Whether it'll get us what we want and hope for remains to be seen.

WIU is a state school located in Macomb, Illinois, about an hour from the Mississippi River, 90 minutes from both Peoria and Davenport, Iowa, and about 3 hours from both St. Louis and Chicago. It's farming country, like Jonesboro, but different crops: corn and soybean, mostly, rather than rice and cotton. It's small--about 20,000 people, and according to people I've spoken to in the department, that drops to under 10,000 during the summer. Melissa and I have done the small town thing before, but only in the South; we're looking forward to seeing how much different (or better, or worse) the experience will be in the Midwest. The move will take us back to the land of four full seasons, which is nice, and it will also get us closer to Melissa's family in Michigan. And I've liked, so far, the people I've spoken to there, and the classes I'm lined up to teach. Yes, I guess you could say we're excited--nervous, but excited. We've never lived in any one place longer than three years anyway (even our stay in Virginia while I was in graduate school was divided up by a couple of moves), so perhaps this is just some small part of our brains telling us it's time to move on. In any case, we'll be here until I complete my summer teaching (around the first week of August), and then we'll be Illinois bound. In the meantime, if any of you out there know anything that might help us prepare us for western Illinois--about parks, schools, food, weather, anything--we'd be delighted to hear from you.

Expect regular blogging--well, as regular as it ever gets around here--to resume tomorrow.

Politics and the Movies: A Bleg

And so, on to the summer. (Assuming I survive the usual finals week grading chaos, that is.) Second summer term, starting in July, I'm going to be teaching a political theory course on politics and film; specifically, I want to look at certain movies which have advanced or contributed to political arguments and ideas, and use those films (and whatever writings and reviews I can dig up on them) as a springboard to discuss the arguments and ideas which they communicate or assume. In short, this isn't going to be a "the politics of film"-type of class. I'm not interested in forcing a bunch of political science students to acquaint themselves with film and cultural criticism so as to be able to interrogate what movies do (as worthy a subject as that is); rather, I'm looking to make use of what any number of movies have said about this or that political or social subject. (Is it just an excuse to watch movies in class during the summer and thus escape lecturing? Or is it an honest attempt to teach students how to respond intellectually to the art form they are most often exposed to anyway? Why, a little bit of both, of course.)

The primary question, of course, is what films to watch? We probably won't watch more than eight, because I want ample class time to remain for discussing various readings which I will assign both before and after we watch any given film. But I can't start collecting those readings until I'm sure what films to include. Ideally I'd like the class to be able to watch a couple of films in a row that bring up, in a significant way, a single theme or cluster of themes and would be able to serve more or less as antipodes to our discussion. Perhaps that won't be possible, but that's what I'm aiming for at the moment. So I'm looking for recommendations. Remember, what I'm searching for here are movies with some provocative political content or which lend themselves to conflicting political interpretations, not films that are, in themselves, political works (i.e., no Fahrenheit 9/11, no Triumph of the Will), or movies that are entirely about political events (i.e., no All the President's Men). And simply to make obtaining and viewing these movies easier, and to increase the likelihood that there are some good theoretical writing out there discussing them, I'd like to stick with major, English-language releases. So far the films I'm seriously thinking about including are Dirty Harry and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (addressing violence and the social contract); and Thelma & Louise and In the Company of Men (addressing gender and power), though I could probably be talked out of those. Other films I'd really like to include, but I'm uncertain about how to best frame them, are Meet John Doe, Gattaca, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Any suggestions or criticisms would be welcome.