Herder and Relativism (Enlightened and Otherwise)

Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18th-century German pastor, educator, translator, literary critic, and philosopher, consumed much of my life and thought from 1998-2001, while I was writing my dissertation on him. For the first couple of years after finishing my PhD, Herder continued to be my focus, as I clumsily tried to turn my dissertation into a book (no luck), to salvage academic articles from it (somewhat more successfully), and, of course, to sell it as an important part of the research agenda I could offer to the schools I interviewed at (a complete failure). My first blog, with its ridiculous name, was a reflection of that time. After a while, though, I stopped trying to pretend to myself that I had any plausible chance whatsoever of becoming a serious Herder scholar or specialist (or a genuine political philosopher at all, for that matter), and gratefully just tried to do my best the small corner of academia in which I managed to land. Since then, Herder has only rarely been on my mind. However, it just happens that I've received the invitation to review a couple of books on the man, here at the beginning of 2013. Here's some thoughts of mine on the first one; the second will come soon.

Sonia Sikka's 2011 book, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism, is a work of pure philosophy, first and foremost. While she reflects upon how Herder's ideas have implication for how we think about history, culture, race, language, art, and more, her primary focus is given in the title of the book, explicated thoroughly in the first chapter, and then re-occurs throughout the rest of the text: namely, how Herder should be understood as a thinker who is both a universalist and a relativist, some who, one the one hand, could hold that there is "a minimally common human nature" which makes possible definitive cross-cultural and historical judgments of "practices, behaviors, and social arrangements that appear to damage the well-being of individuals" (p. 22), and on the other hand, affirm a "relativism about happiness [which] implies a deep form of evaluative incommensurability entailing that forms of happiness possible among these different societies...cannot be ranked" (p. 37). It's not surprising that Sikka makes this the heart of her consideration of Herder's contributions to philosophy, as the larger problem of "the One and the Many," of how to make sense of both particular differences and larger unities, has been one of the central pre-occupations of Western philosophy for as long as it has existed. Herder's writings are hardly oblivious to that fact; on the contrary, Isaiah Berlin once rightly described this struggle over how to respect both historical distinctions and natural commonalities--"the notion of unity in difference, still more of differences in unity"--as Herder's "idée maîtresse." This is especially true given the argument over how to situate Herder in regards to the universalism of the Enlightenment: was he wholly opposed to it, only partly so, or best described as articulating some parallel "counter-Enlightenment" at the same time? This historical question is one which Sikka gives extensive treatment, developing at length thoughtful arguments regarding Herder's relationship to Kant (which, as those of us who have studied the man know, is also a major theme in Herderian scholarship). So in sum, while those scholars who have become interested in Herder through the ways he has been employed in recent years by scholars of culture, nationality, and community to explore the nature of belonging may not find the general orientation of this book especially helpful to them, Sikka's overarching interpretation of Herder is a strong one, and as she persuasively connects it to most of the other issues addressed throughout the book's chapters, I think all who are curious about the man's work--including political theorists, historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists, not just philosophers--would benefit from giving it some time.

The essence of Sikka's overall interpretation is that Herder's universalism and relativism find their connection through his insistence on employing an anthropological and empirical--and thus, in a Kantian sense, thoroughly "pre-critical"--lens through which to ask questions about "happiness," "identity," "morality," or any other such quality about which we might be called to make judgments. For Herder, a study of history, rather a reflection upon the categories of thought, is the best way to get clear on how human beings construct their lives, and therefore is the only appropriate way for one has recognized the great diversity which exists in the world to respectfully and ethically interact with it. Sikka admirably (and, I think, correctly) lays out the consequences of this distinction in the second chapter of the book:

Whereas Kant sees human beings as standing over against the world, Herder sees them as "woven into the whole of the world with all the threads of their existence." Ultimately, that is why emotions are, for Kant, "blind followers," whereas, for Herder, they are "discoverers leading our interpretations of the world"....As a result, Kant and Herder come to very different conclusions about what defines the character of the morally good person. Kant states that the person of cold temperament who acts from duty thereby gives himself a "higher worth" that the person who acts from sympathetic inclination. Herder claims that "merely following rules," without possessing virtue, means wanting to follow cold reason alone, and not enjoying the whole feeling part of humanity." It is not that Kant thinks the best person is cold-hearted, but, for him, virtue resides in choosing to do one's duty, and this choice is never more visible than when it is made in opposition to inclinations. Herder's idea of the virtuous person, by contrast, closely resembles Schiller's model of the "beautiful soul," in whom sense and reason, duty and inclination, harmonize....Herder always favors the perception of continuities and gradations, within the human psyche as well as in nature. (pp. 65, 67-68)

The importance of happiness, as well as other similar characteristics, for understanding Herder is fairly obvious to one who chooses to get acquainted with the larger philosophical argument which Herder (and Sikka) confront; of all Herder's voluminous writings on human culture and history, probably none is better known (thanks to the work of Isaiah Berlin, who made extensive use of it in developing his influential interpretation of Herder) than his relatively short monograph Yet Another Philosophy of History of the Formation of Humankind, which includes--in one its relatively rare crystal-clear sentences--the insistence: "Each nation has its center of happiness in itself, like every sphere has its own center of gravity!" In other words, according to Herder one really can't--not if one takes seriously the idea of basic human rights, anyway, as both Kant and Herder did--"stand over against the world" and make judgments about what will result in the happiness or progress or authenticity of those living within it; only those actually living in the culture or community in question, with its own history and character, can make that judgment. Absent Kant's elevation of the question of judgment into categorical realms, one simply has to take seriously the anthropological, empirical "facts on the ground," and thus also take seriously the language and perspective of those who belong to each particular place and time. Hence, for Herder there is presumably a genuine relativism (not a "pluralism," a label which Sikka thinks fails to recognize what she sees as Herder's insistence that "the goodness of individual lives is relative...to their achievement of the goals and ideals presented to them as desirable and worthy in the society of which they are members"--p. 4) when it comes to one's study of the world and its history.

How does Sikka see this same "pre-critical" lens as bringing some universalism into Herder's philosophy, and thus giving his relativism an "Enlightened" aspect? By treating Herder's key moral ideal--Humanität--primarily in a similarly anthropological fashion, reading it as conveying true moral import, but the nature of that importance being tied to the shared "aptitudes and predispositions" of human being; Humanität, as Sikka sees it, is fundamentally Herder's expression of "the ideal essence of the species," something which exists within the "general nature of man" itself (pp. 20-21, 75). So human beings carry within themselves a common capacity, rooted in our basic physicality and sociality, and on that basis one can authentically assess whether real progress towards moral betterment--that is, a fuller realization of that capacity--is taking place within the life of another person--or, more relevantly to Herder's interests, within the history of a nation or people. That this realization will take multiple forms is a given by Herder; hence, for Sikka, the primary ethical imperative of Herder's ideal is freedom: that is, allowing as many peoples to be able to linguistically, religiously, and politically develop their humanity in their own ways as possible. As she writes:

While Herder takes issue with many elements of Kant's moral philosophy, he wholeheartedly agrees with the basic principle that all humanity deserves respect, and that the recognition of this principle in practice entails political freedom. In this sense, Herder does promote the global realization of a single ideal....The ideal political condition of Humanität is...one in which no people is favored, insulted, or given the rights to rule over others, and in which cultures and allowed to flourish as integral wholes distinct from one another. (pp. 117, 120)

I cannot disagree with this reading of Herder's central philosophical concerns; clearly, Herder's whole vision of the world was in a very real sense anthropological and empirical--he was a philosophical realist, convinced that the best metaphors for understanding the world were sensuous and organic ones, reflecting his belief that all which as worth knowing or even was capable of being known about it had its roots in natural, knowable processes. Sikka correctly notes this realism in his philosophy (pp. 105, 206-207), and thus makes a good case for seeing Herder as a thinker who has a very material conception of both humanity's diversity and our shared anthropology (a phenomenon most clearly revealed in our expressive propensity for language, and its constitutive cultural consequences). This allows her to build her argument for seeing Herder as both a universalist and a relativist on fairly unambiguous ground, intelligently importing that philosophical framework into an analysis of Herder's ideas about history, race, progress, and more. It is a solid argument--but not, for me, a wholly persuasive one. This is not to say that I didn't learn a good many things about Herder from Sikka's book; I absolutely did. But, as she herself notes when discussing Herder's philosophy of language, "one cannot do justice to Herder's conception of language as a central constituent of cultural identity without examining the metaphysical, rather than exclusively anthropological, dimensions of this idea" (p. 183). The same could be said at many points throughout the book--to take Herder's claims on their own terms, the metaphysical must be conceived as connected to the anthropological. Sikka does frequently note that, for Herder, there is no clear demarcation between these two areas of inquiry, and she ably discusses the way Herder's concept of Kraft, an undefinable "living organic force" (p. 141) plays a connecting role here. But I remain unsatisfied with her treatment of the connection nonetheless, as if she was convinced that Herder himself would have been in agreement with her apparent conclusion that his own universalism was ultimately a thin veneer over a deeper pluralism. Herder, I think, would not have agreed with that conviction at all.

I have to admit that part of this disagreement with Sikka may simply be sour grapes, arising from her treatment of a published argument of my own about Herder. She approvingly makes use of an observation of mine about the metaphysical implications of Herder's constitutive approach to language, noting that "for Herder, what is taking place in the formation of language 'is not a purely subjective ordering, but an alignment of our thinking with truths that are there to be understood' and that...'finding forms of expression is, therefore, a way of relating to reality'" (p. 183). But then, a few pages later, she quotes me again, and writes that "[i]t cannot be true...that 'Herder believed that when we mark off and hermeneutically open up, through language, an understanding of the given historical and natural context which informs all our thinking, we are situating ourselves into communities which share a grasp of things that is fundamentally right'" (p. 190). I cannot see why Sikka would want to distance Herder from what seems apparent to both me and other students of his writings: namely, his own belief that there are true accounts of history, reality, and morality revealed through the process of expression. This is especially puzzling given that in Sikka's own thorough account of Herder's philosophy she notes multiple times that, for Herder, "words actually represent bits of the world"; that "[w]hat is special about human beings...is their ability to reflect on what presses upon them and to bring it to the explicitness of the word...[which is] a form of revelation"; and that "Herder sees the human subjects as bound up with the reality it perceives and thinks that he can claim: 'the thing itself'...exists 'in you, in me, as in all objects'" (pp. 177, 189, 211). Perhaps the problem is simply that Sikka does not see Herder's ethical universalism, and thus his invocations of reality and truth, as grounded in anything more substantive than his anthropology of human beings, since his metaphysical reflections seemed to her to be conditioned more by the particularity of human expressions of happiness and so forth than anything more unified. But if that is the case, then Sikka's problem is in fact one she has in common with some of the most important of Herder scholars: she's not reading his Christian writings. And given that Herder's actual profession was that of a Lutheran clergyman and educator, that's an unfortunate gap, however common it might be.

Herder's religious writings--not just his studies of Old Testament language and poetry, which are well known, but his sermons, his counsel to other preachers, and his reflections on Christian teachings, history, and ecclesiology--are numerous, and too rarely read. (Berlin himself almost totally ignored them.) Herder's major work on the nature of God, God: Some Conversations, his engagement in the "pantheist controversy" involving the legacy of Spinoza in 18th-century Germany, is more often considered, and Sikka focuses on it in her final chapter, though I think her overall conclusions about Herder's "enlightened relativism" lead her to miss the even deeper paradox of Herder's faith than that book showed. That "Herder's position on religious diversity blends a species of relativism--in this case an appreciation of the cultural relativity of symbolic forms--with a universalism projecting a broad ideal of human flourishing" (p. 241) is mostly correct, but it fails to address Herder's clear prioritizing of the Christian value of some specific types of human attachment to those symbolic forms over others. Sikka does note Herder's "privileging" of Christianity, but tends to understand that applause for its place in history as part of Herder's imagining of Christianity "as exclusively a moral code, stripped of ritual, ceremony, symbol, and arguably all that makes it a particular religion" (pp. 219-220). This suggestion that Herder was eliding particularity, including particular symbolic forms, which talking about the moral reality and force of Christianity is, I think, simply wrong. On the contrary, anyone familiar with his essay On National Religions (which Sikka never cites) can't help but be struck at his emphasis upon the idea that religious truth was best realized through the specific development of "a pure, free Christian religion," one which was connected to the expressive development of a particular people (which he saw most impressively in the development of Lutheranism through Germany). This is in opposition to Christianity's realization as a "national church" like Roman Catholicism (which he critically calls "state Christianity") or Henry VIII's Church of England.

The complicated, confusing truth is simply that Herder's relativism--which was quite real--perhaps wasn't so much "Enlightened" as reflecting a nuanced Protestant teleology, one which consisted of a multiplicity of divine revelations to be worked out in diverse times and places, yet all of which Herder believed shared a connection (via Kraft, the operation of which Herder equated, in a funeral sermon, with "God's own intent") to "true convictions about God and human beings." Through this undefined and perhaps essentially unknowable historical process, Christianity would ultimately become the "pure dew of heaven for all nations, which neither changes any tree's character or type of fruit, nor strip any person of their own nature." Humanität, therefore, had for Herder a much more substantive shape than that of human beings being capable of an expressive exploration and development of their own human capacities, and the ethical imperative to respect such; for Herder, it meant the revelation of the divine origin of those capacities. As he put it in probably his most consistent and important work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind: "O benevolent God, you did not leave your creation to murderous chance; you engraved your image, religion, and humanity on the human soul. The outline of the statue lies there, hidden in dark, deep marble, but this outline cannot hew or fashion itself. Tradition and teaching, reason and experience must do this; and yet, you have sufficiently supplied the means for obtaining them." No, Herder did not believe that everyone would eventually become Lutheran--but he did believe that Lutheranism contributed to and joined in with a religion of humanity, of Billigkeit or equal treatment, a particularized and organic Christian message for everyone in every place, whatever or wherever that may be. Kant may have famously denied knowledge in order to make room for religious faith, but for Herder, relative anthropological knowledge and a unifying metaphysical faith--a Christian and humane one--were both available to us, if one would only stop constructing distracting rational and cosmopolitan philosophies and instead see the world as it really was.

In the end, I have to say that I think very highly Sikka's book; it is well-written, comprehensive but not over-long, and makes a strong argument for its overall thesis, one that should be taken seriously by any student of Herder's philosophy, and which has important things to say to those approaching Herder with an eye to his historical, literary, political, and anthropological contributions as well. I am critical of Sikka's work only in that I feel that she did not take Herder seriously enough as a religious thinker, as someone who, in his own way, was very conscious of the problem for Enlightenment Europe of religion in general and Christianity in particular, and whose response to that problem was deeply entwined in his whole philosophy of relativism and universalism. I would be fascinated to read a work of Sikka's which applied the same rigor and thought she shows in this book to those parts of Herder's legacy that perhaps didn't appear to her to be relevant to her thesis. In contrast to her, I think they are very relevant. But I can only make that observation after having worked through this fine scholarly work, and for that I'm in her debt.

Same-Sex Marriage in the Courts (of Public Opinion, and Otherwise)

Yesterday, the British House of Commons voted 400 to 175 in support of a bill which will legalize same-sex marriages in Great Britain. I'm happy--for the outcome, yes (which I've changed my mind about), but more importantly for the way the outcome came about. Years of protest and agitation, days and weeks and months of discussion, hours of parliamentary debate, and then, finally, a vote. That's the better way.

I'm put in mind of this belief of mine as my church has once again involved itself in the continuing litigation over same-sex marriage in the United States. (I'm among the many Mormons who kind of hoped that some recent developments indicated that our church was willing to let the legacy of the Proposition 8 fight of 2008 fade away, but apparently we're not quite there yet.) This litigation--both sides of it--annoys me. Granted, the history of votes regarding same-sex marriage in the U.S.--whether in the form of popular referendums or legislative action--has basically been a story of many, many losses over the past decade and a half, followed by, over the past couple of years, a rising number of wins, so presumably I ought be happy that with courts making decisions about rights and taking such out of the hands of fickle voters. But the opposite is the case; the uneven record of voting on this issue isn't particularly troubling to me at all--given that I've been through a long patch of unevenness myself, there isn't anything perplexing about realizing that so many others are working their way through a similar reconsideration. No, what I do find frustrating--especially in comparison with how this matter was ultimately, and wisely, handled in Great Britain--is the way democratic activity in this country is so often reduced to judicial claims and counter-claims, taking the issue away from the courts of public opinion and giving it to other, less democratic courts. As things stand now, come the end of March, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule definitively (maybe!) on the constitutionality of both state and national efforts to legalize or deny legal recognition to same-sex couples. I suppose it would be right to say I hope they rule in favor of the legality of such, given my changed opinions on the matter--but also given that such a decision would take the form of a legal mandate which will almost certainly run roughshod over the laws adopted by dozens of states, all of which have the support of millions of citizens, I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

If I now believe that same-sex marriage should be recognized as a legally defensible and positive civic good, which should I care about those whose opinions would be found constitutionally lacking by a decision which I support? Would I have cared about the consequences of Brown v. Board of Education for racists, for example? Well, my answer to the latter is "no"--but my answer to the former is that I just quite don't believe that opponents of same-sex marriage are necessarily operating from the same kind of irrational animus which many of those who were scandalized by the end of segregation presumably were. It's quite easy to position oneself on the probably winning (and, again, I think right) side of history here, and say that the passage of time will prove that same-sex marriage opponents are ultimately cut from the same bigoted cloth, and I can't deny that might, decades hence, turn out to be the case. But for now, as one who prefers the messy imbalances of democracy to the supposedly clear (but for all that usually arbitrary) impositions of the law, and for whom the past three years have mostly just provided confirmation of my many doubts about trusting in the judicial branch), as well as one who not too long ago was persuaded by a certain argument against same-sex marriages, I just can't see in the supporters of Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act and the opponents of what the House of Commons just voted for something so obviously out of line with our country's evolving political ideas as to deserve the judicial squashing which Boies and Olson (and perhaps President Obama too) clearly think it deserves.

After all, as much mockery as the idea has received from one side of the divide, the claim which my church's lawyers have signed on to--that advocates of traditional heterosexual marriage and supporters of same-sex marriage have in mind visions of marriage which are in "deep tension" with one another, "one inherently intergenerational, the other primarily interpersonal; one focused on children's and society's needs, the other on the desires of the couple"--is not, I think, obviously silly or just a cover for raw distaste and prejudice. It is, on the contrary, entirely plausible (if not, to me, any longer convincing) to argue that the physical differences between men and women, and their reproductive potential, make it incumbent upon society to legally ratify such relationships in a socially beneficial way that homosexual couplings, no matter how loving or civic-minded, are biologically capable of ever being. Moreover, it is not obviously ludicrous to me to note that, given the widespread support for numerous statues in several states providing near marriage-identical forms of civil protection and social validation to gays and lesbians, the argument about the harms of Proposition 8 are probably not quite the same as those 14th-Amendment-centered harms which activated judicial interventions into the political deliberations of the states in the cases of, for example, Romer v. Evans or Loving v. Virginia. And finally, it does not strike me as obviously nonsensical to suggest that a society which truly takes the principle of equal respect seriously should reject the easy solution of "sameness" offered by inviting homosexual couples--who arguably will have a moral and social and sexual teleology in their relationships quite different from those of heterosexuals--into a marriage institution which was designed for people whose needs are distinct from theirs. And when this last argument concludes with a call for churches and other religious institutions to accept the Christian duty to love gays the same as straights, and work out institutions which will serve their teleology as well as heterosexual marriage has served the rest of the population, I think even the most dismissive critics ought to at least acknowledge the decency of their intentions.

All this is to simply say that these are beliefs--just like, I think, most beliefs--that deserve to be taken seriously enough to allow them to be argued out in public, and for the courts of public opinion to respond to them as they will--whether in support or in opposition. This isn't an argument that every democratic majority everywhere ought to have its way all the time, but just a wish that people were more willing to accept the (when properly limited within a reasonable understanding of basic liberal rights) wins and losses of democratic life, and how the lives which get worked out democratically will differ from community to community, and from era to era. Minds do change; they change all the time. For me--to focus just on the first claim above--the accusation that accepting same-sex marriage meant accepting as normative for purposes of social recognition a genderless choice-driven individuality ran aground on my ultimate unwillingness to fully sign on to the sexual inegalitarianism which such an accusation of individuality presumes. Obviously Melissa and I are raising daughters, not sons, and that difference matters. But I couldn't continue to believe, as we taught our daughters and encouraged them to consider themselves equal to both boys and men in the face of the pornographic misogyny which powers so much of the capitalist marketplace which surrounds them, that--to use the terms quoted from the brief above--community-preserving intergenerationality depends on impressing upon them their particular role within a companionate, heterosexual marriage, when it was obvious that such doesn't depend equally upon the men (something especially easy to challenge in world which has been transformed by technologies like the birth control pill or in vitro fertilization, to say nothing of the unfortunate--but probably inevitable--consequences of the no-fault divorce revolution). For better and for worse (yes, it's both) ours is a world more interpersonal than otherwise, and I saw that it was possible to argue against rampant individualism in a way which expanded the circle of community--by, among other things, making room for homosexual individuals in the historical practice of monogamous, companionate marriage--rather than holding tightly to a model of an intergenerational thing which had long since already been changed.

(There is, of course, a Mormon angle to all this for me as well; my church has few rivals in its cult of motherhood and its emphasis upon the special role of women in passing the faith along to the next generation. But that, of course, is something which need not be aligned with the civic sphere. Do I think it legitimate for Mormon majorities in their communities to push for such an alignment? Yes, I kind of do, though again in light of basic liberal guarantees, which itself is something which warrants continuing democratic contestation. I will say, though, that I strongly disagree with those who present such a push as something mandated by the logic of Mormon doctrine--that our (non-canonized!, I shout in vain) teachings about the eternity of gender and our (entirely speculative, I similarly grouse) claims for the existence of an exclusively female companionate deity alongside God make it incumbent upon believers to vigorously resist any attempt to suggest that such supposedly divinely sanctioned institutions as heterosexual marriage might accommodate other forms of human existence. The doctrinal grounds for justifying that kind of narrowly conceived--and inevitably party-aligned--movement would make a mockery of our historical political theology, I think.)

What about the other two claims mentioned above? I remain pretty much in agreement with the second: despite the arguments of many, I'm still unconvinced that the restriction of marriage to heterosexuals constitutes a grievous constitutional harm put in place solely with the aim of burdening a specific, disliked minority population. (That does not deny that fact that harms are a reality here--it only denies that the actually existing harms to homosexual individuals is great enough to demand further empowering the judiciary by handing over to them yet one more of our contentious disputes for resolution.) As for the third, well, that argument calls for exactly the sort of thing which, over four years ago, I thought was the best possible solution--and I'd like to be able to believe that we could wean ourselves away from the false and individualistic reading of "equality" that substitutes the idea of the full recognition of difference with legal identicalness. But I don't see ourselves ever being about to manage such a weaning, because of the legacy of a particular strain of liberalism in this country. And speaking idealistically of what we think we ought to be able to do is no good reason to not do something else which, even it does partake of that particular reading of equality, can extend some real interpersonal richness to our social lives as well. And same-sex marriage will do that.

In the meantime, as we get to wait for the Supreme Court to, sometime this summer, either strike down or legitimize same-sex marriage bans, or perhaps to simply punt the whole issue back to the states, where the rigamarole will begin again, Great Britain will get on with what governments are supposed to do--respond to pressing issues by crafting solutions. The House of Lords may delay this bill's route to becoming law, and given the number of Conservative MPs who deserted Prime Minister David Cameron on this vote, maybe there will be major political consequences, even new elections called early. In which case their own rigamarole will continue: but at least the citizens in that country will be able to say that they, however indirectly, were actually a part of whatever final compromise eventually emerges from Parliament, whereas in our case, for all our claims of freedom, we'll really only be able to have a decisive say if the Supreme Court decides we can have one. Frankly, I think same-sex marriage, which I support, deserves a better court than that.

Saturday Night Live Music: "Stairway to Heaven"

I'm going to revive this feature, for a little while anyway, and I can't think of a better song to start the revival with than Led Zeppelin's classic, performed just a couple of months back by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, one of the most accomplished and comparatively overlooked hard rock bands of all time. Jason Bonnham, son of Zep's drummer John Bonham, is on the drums, Shane Fontayne takes on Jimmy Page's electric lead duties (too bad Nancy herself didn't take a stab at it), a horn section and gospel choir with orchestral accompaniment rolls in to make the whole thing even huger, and Ann--despite an unfortunate effort to imitate Robert Plant's pronunciation right at the end of the final lyric--simply kills. An awesome performance. Watch Plant's, Page's and John Paul Jones's heads bob along to the music--you know that in their head it's 40 years ago, and they're still up on the stage, bringing it all to life.

Disney Does It Right

I agree with the film critic from The Telegraph: this is the best work of animation from Disney that I've seen in years. I saw it twice in the theater--the kids enjoyed Wreck-It-Ralph, as did I, enough that we went to see it two times during the holiday season. Both times this little film which played before Ralph, like the best short cartoons, simply melted us with its humor and beauty. The technique behind it--read the above article to learn about the new software used in making Paperman, or read this interview, or watch this video--is fascinating: actual hand-drawn flourishes animated on top of the CGI base. There's a wonderful style to it, and reading through the comments on the blogs reveals all sorts of at first unnoticed touches: the shape of the characters echo Aladdin, the paper airplanes hearken to the opening of Fantasia: 2000, and the hero's boss looks like no one so much as Bryon Brassballs from Dark Knight Returns. Endless levels here--which is what the best art is supposed to provide. Anyway, enjoy.

"Our Crab Guys, They Don't Have Meat."

Very nice, and the Beyonce is a serious improvement. But honestly, if these chaps had any real guts, they would have gone after the Inaugural Poem. That really needed it.

Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design) the idealization (and arguably the idol-ization) of what he understands to be "quintessentially American" principles, to be called "Independence, USA." It'll be built somewhere in Texas, at a likely cost of over $2 billion, but Beck is not deterred; this is something, he says, the God is inspiring him to do.

Mockery ensures, of course, and at least some of that is deserved. If you watched his whole presentation (and I urge you to do so, starting here), it gets rather difficult to be sure exactly where Beck's ideas for a theme park end (so much of his vision apparently being preoccupied with the creation of media centers which will tell entertaining but "true" stories, beginning this year with the creation of a multi-media extravaganza about, it seems, the epic American battle of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, told from the point of view of the moon), and where his ideas for an actual living space begin. At one point in the presentation, while talking about the need for real self-sufficiency in Independence, Beck gestures at a picture of some powerful wind turbines built on a hill over the community, but then later says they were a mistake, inserted by the sneaky employee at Blaze TV just to piss Beck off, leaving the question of how this community will obtain its energy unresolved. He apparently likely imagines it being built somewhere in north Texas, but how many people will live there, or why they will move, or what they will do there, is similarly in need of more detail.

I'm sufficiently in sync with the cultural preferences of my mostly left-leaning academic tribe that such mockery of Beck comes easily to me; I've done it before, and will likely do it again. But in truth, I find Beck's utopian dreaming more fascinating than ridiculous. For starters, what kind of community does he have in mind here? Most of those who have reported on his grandiose vision have labeled it "libertarian" or "Ayn-Rand-inspired," comparing it with such paranoid ventures as The Citidel or, more ominously and meanly, Jonestown. Obviously you can't dismiss that kind of motivation; Beck has never pretended not to be inspired by the radical libertarianism/constitutionalism/individualism of a John Galt or a Ron Paul. And the problems with this kind of extremism, a real fetishization of personal liberty, are obvious; as Peter Levine tartly observes, if you truly take this kind of rejection of all forms of collectivism seriously, than "you secede from the corrupt, liberty-forgetting society around you and raise your kids in a setting where they will turn out to be libertarians (unless they rebel against you and define themselves as anti-libertarians, but even then you will have shaped them)...if you succeed, you will have forced them to be free." But Beck can't really be placed entirely within that category. If you listen to the whole presentation, and especially if you're familiar (which, as a fellow member of the Mormon church like Beck, I actually am) with the pious, family-centered devotional tropes he frequently makes use of, then you hear so much more which isn't exactly libertarian. He wants "wisely" planned living spaces, where all the streets are underground and everyone lives on a cul-de-sac, so people will get out of their homes and enjoy their neighborhood. He wants a marketplace where there is "no Gap stores, no Ann Taylor," but only craft-based businesses which offer apprenticeships, and don't require any "Ivy League" diplomas. He wants a local, sustainable food system. He wants, basically, a community which celebrates "simpler times." Sounds more Front Porch Republic than Galt's Gulch.

Jesse Walker call's Beck's vision "populist-utopian," but I think he's wrong there too. I mean, I suppose if one imagines "populism" in explicitly (and solely) Jeffersonian terms, that description might work--but in reference to the actual Populists, or the way the term has been used since then, there is little what Beck lays out here which suggests an attack on the powers that be or a restructuring of society around increased economic democracy and sovereignty. Indeed, aside from a few arguable swipes against corporate capitalism (which I suspect Beck is either unaware of or would deny that he made), the only thing which is attacked here is our education system. And this is where Beck truly comes alive, and truly reveals his dream as being, whether he realizes it or not, as being more about Plato's Republic than anything else. He essentially, if unintentionally, speaks of creating a civil religion, with an all-glass, sunlight-reflecting, impressively spired building at the center of the community (forgive the Mormon in me for immediately thinking "temple" and "Zion") which would be a repository of historical documents and artifacts from throughout history, so that whenever someone is confused about what America's real principles are, they can come to Independence, be "deprogrammed" from what is taught in America's universities, and "be shown the truth!" (Beck repeats that about three times.) I can't help but think of people being led out of the cave by the philosopher-kings, and seeing the sun (the Declaration of Independence! the Constitution! portraits of the Founding Fathers! and...other stuff, I guess) for the first time.

Years ago, I noticed a similarity between Glenn Beck and James Gordon "Bo" Gritz, another Mormon (though only for a short time) conservative who became convinced of conspiracies and truths which, somehow, his ideological fellows nonetheless weren't captivated by. (Look at all you fans of Glenn Beck: sure, you voted against Obama, but are you teaching your children the Mayflower Compact? Have you stopped shopping at the Gap? Why not?!?) And this led Gritz, as it is apparently leading Beck, to want to proselytize, to redeem, to create safe environments of learning that troubled people can flee from. Again, this is easy to mock, but I don't want to. I don't want to, because there is, at the heart of this impulse, a longing for a yeoman independence and interconnectedness, for communities of solidarity, for the truth which can be known when people are fully enjoined in their civic spaces. Populism was a way to communicate that idea, whereas libertarianism is, I think, too often a corruption of it. Either way, though, there is a transformative, utopian impulse here, and the impulse is which animates all the best kind of home-making and community-building. Too bad Beck's is so warped--and, frankly, kind of stupid--that he's apparently incapable to making the kind of critique of liberalism which would open up to him the real, plausible, communitarian alternatives out there, whether distributist or anarchist or social democratic or all of the above, in one fashion or another. Like Gritz, Beck knows what he wants (well, sort of, anyway), but he's unwilling to think carefully about what's really stopping him from having it (his own fellow citizens and the genuine appeal and logic of the liberal order, being a primary one). Thus does he make utopia a source of snide mockery. Like I said, a fascinating process, though a frustrating one as well.


I confirm the subscription of this blog to the Paperblog service under the username russellarbenfox.

Cats Are Smarter Than Dogs. Period.

I strongly suspect, on the basis of a totally unsupportable stereotype which I unfairly invoke solely on the basis of the annoying voice recording on the video, that this particular cat may be smarter than its owner too.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and the Ground on Which Communities Are Built

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The final sentence in Behind the Beautiful Forevers--Katherine Boo's wonderfully written, devastatingly detailed narrative of several fascinating, despairing stories that took place over the period of a couple of years in a Mumbai slum called Annawadi--sums up the message of the whole book as well as any concluding sentence I've ever read does: "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits is uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?" There is a deep truth, and a challenge, in that sentence: one which I was already cognizant of, but which, having just finished this much-praised book, will remember that much more firmly. Anyone concerned about the way in the shape and foundation of one's home or community may either open up or foreclose possibilities for justice or freedom or virtue needs to remember it--and reading this fine book is a good way to help that remembrance along.

The obvious referent of the final sentence is the wretched tale of Abdul Hakim Husain, a young man (perhaps 16 years old, perhaps 19--"his parents were hopeless with dates") whose tragic story forms the primary backbone of the book, though his life is only one of dozens whom Boo skillfully introduces us to. Very briefly, Adbul is the primary earner in his family of eleven, a scavenger of refuse whose skill at picking through and sorting different types of trash to later be sold to recyclers had given his family, through years of work, a tiny amount of financial stability and hope. They had been able to afford rejected bricks (the slum was surrounded by rapidly constructed luxury hotels, designed to serve the newly rich of Mumbai flying in and out of the nearby international airport, on whose land the slum sat) for their hut, making it the sturdiest dwelling along their makeshift street; they had been able to afford the tuition for a "third-rate Urdu-language private school" for the second-oldest son, Mirchi; they owned their own vehicle, giving them an edge in transporting the garbage they sorted through to recyclers; they'd even been able to save enough to make a deposit on a plot of land in a predominantly Muslim community outside of Mumbai, thus giving the the Husains the hope of becoming actual landowners and escaping the 3000+ person, half-acre collection of illegal, more or less desperately poor and uneducated squatters that made up Annawadi.

But it was not to be. As Boo expertly chronicles, the deprivation of Annawadi did not make for a united community, but rather a constantly shifting, usually bitter and suspicious, relentlessly competitive and often corrupt group of individuals. Anti-Muslim sentiments, common in Mumbai, were part of it, but most of it was just the plain and ugly truth that, when one lacks any kind of stable home to retreat to, or vocation to identify with, the smallest slights and most pathetic grievances can take on hysterical importance. The day came that the Husains were attempting some upgrades to their hut, installing some floor tiles and a stone shelf, working to make it level. The weak bricks which made up their walls crumbled somewhat in the midst of the construction, shaking their next-door neighbor's hut, occupied by another Muslim family, dominated by their sexually promiscuous, one-legged mother--who had been, predictably, subject to multiple levels of harassment, discrimination, and mockery by Annawadi's other residents--named Fatima. Some sand fell into the rice she was cooking. A fight broke out, with shouting and accusations aplenty; Fatima claimed that she would put the Husains "in a trap," complained to the local (and completely corrupt) constabulary at the Sahar Police Office, then dumped kerosene on herself and set herself on fire. As Boo puts it, Abdul's life "exploded" at that instance. What followed was arrest, police beatings, long confinement, bribery and doctored hospital reports and false claims on all sides, the collapse of the Husain's scavenging business and the loss of all their meager savings, and criminal trials which ultimately left Abdul's father exonerated of the accusation of inciting Fatima to commit suicide but Abdul in legal limbo, perhaps permanently. 

There is much more to the story than that, and that is only one of the many stories Boo has to share. But that specific reference--to Abdul's attempt to build a shelf level and straight, when his family's wall and foundations were rickety in the extreme, and the unforeseeable consequences which followed--not only encapsulates Abdul's story, but connects to the larger theme of the whole book. In an environment where the law is only sporadically enforced (and then usually only when a hefty fee is paid in advance), where criminality are the rule (at one point in the story Abdul resolves to no longer traffic in stolen metal, but in the face of complete deprivation abandons that pledge, to his regret: "I tell Allah I love Him immensely...but I cannot be better, because of how the world is"), where violence and despair go hand in hand (the book features several deaths, including the suicide of a young girl who saw death as the only way to escape beatings from her parents and an arranged marriage she detested), exactly what can be accomplished? That some things are accomplished is undeniable: among the Annawadi's inhabitants are at least a couple of young people who manage to get college educations and move out of the slum-squatting class (though in the case of one of them, that's at least partly the result of her mother's corrupt political maneuvering and marital infidelities). But for the great majority of the slum's residents, most of whom had fled to Mumbai seeking opportunity in the face of starvation in the countryside (the rural village home of one of the book's main characters was in the midst of drought, with much of the little available remaining land having been taken away by "large-scale corporate and government modernization projects") what they faced was the enduring continuation of the same: scrambling day to day, earning just enough to eat. No collective action was possible, because there were no collective resources to be harnessed to improve one's lot, and no trust that any such resources, even if they existed, could be used responsibly. While not quite a dog-eat-dog world (Boo notes that the rapacious yet resourceful folks she focused on lived in the comparatively more wealthy part of the Annawadi slum; they actually had huts, didn't sleep in the streets, and didn't have to eat rats or grass to survive, as the truly desperate of Annawadi residents did), it was close.

Boo, at one point near the end of the book, makes a rare, observational aside about what she had seen in her years of reporting:

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now; the quashing of voter applications at the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborers' pay. Abdul was one of many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together....Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, they improved their lot by beggaring the life chances of other people.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor looked down on one another, the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

I think about my own home--on a quiet, older suburban street in Wichita, KS, in walking distance from our children's public schools and our church, in biking distance from my work at a small liberal arts college--and I reflect upon just how much social effort and investment, how much taxation and regulation, how much civil religion and traditional instruction, how much labor unrest and market response, and how many years of all of the above had to go into making the ordinary things I take for granted possible. Here, we have citizens who will call for ambulances and even attempt to help when they see someone hit by a car and dying in the street; police who respond to complaints and won't immediately ask for a bribe; schools where instruction of whatever quality actually takes place day after day; fathers who know that beating their wives and raping their daughters is immoral and wrong and may even (if prosecutors are doing their job!) send them to jail; jobs where employees have protection from arbitrary dismissal and receive a decent wage; city governments that will acknowledge that a backed up sewer is public health hazard and ought to be fixed; hospitals where trained care-givers have, at the very least, enough beds and drugs and needles to minimally do their work. And that realization leads me to reflect on how even just a slight fraying of the social fabric--through family breakdown, through the retreat from civic obligations, through the privatizing of public responsibilities (Boo writes trenchantly about how the wealthy of India had, throughout the boom years, "typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government" through setting up their own schools and security agencies, rather than improving the public safety net), and perhaps most of all through the government and corporate actions (and inactions) which leave people without any sustainable or dependable ground to build upon, and thus have no choice to flee, migrate, follow the whatever random winds of opportunity they think they see, even if it results them crowding their families into mostly hopeless slums--can start to unwind the many threads that make up the whole.

We're lucky people, the great majority of any of us who are reading this website--the ground on which the communities we are part of were built is, mostly, pretty solid. Not as solid as it might be, but far more solid than the sewage-infected ground of Annawadi. Boo did not write this book, I think, just to get her readers to think "there but for the grace of God go I"--but such is clearly one result of her writing, and it's not an unreasonable one. Those of us who have families and homes and neighborhoods and communities (local or national) where justice and freedom and virtue are, if not automatic, than at least genuinely available opportunities--as opposed to at-best random, unaccountable happenstances--need to keep in mind the enormous political, cultural, economic, and social work which has gone into distinguishing our fortunate environments from those of the Husains, and guard against letting our frustrations with the complexities of modernity lead us into picking apart the very ground our world is built upon.

Why Haven't I Seen The Hobbit Yet?

It's January 3, 2013, and I still haven't made it to the theater to see The Hobbit. Why not?

Party because of all the partially negative (or at least less-than-enthusiastic) reviews, I'm sure. But I'm an old and committed Tolkien geek, who tool Jackson's previous adaptions very seriously, even when I fully recognized all the ways they failed to work, even on their own terms as movies. Surely hang-ups with 48 fps cinematography isn't enough to dissuade me, is it?

Comments by other, certified fantasy geeks, like Alan Jacobs and Jacob T. Levy, cut closer to what is probably my main reluctance. Alan and Jacob expressing their criticisms (which are both reluctant, I should note; they both enjoyed themselves at the film) differently, but they ultimately point in the same direction: the transformation of the Thorin & Company into awesome, apparently unstoppable super-warriors or video-game characters, with the consequent diminishing of both the Gandalf-centric Important Stuff which Jackson has elected to lard these movies up with, and more importantly of Bilbo and his journey itself. That probably is the heart of it, there. Because, you see, I love Bilbo's story--and I mean its story, the way it's laid out in Tolkien's Hobbit, which I consider to be a tremendous children’s novel, really one of the very best of the genre. It's funny, exciting, surprising, dramatic, and filled with homespun wisdom--all of which is conveyed alongside hints of a deeper historical myth infecting the language and rhythm of the tale, but never stopping it from being what it is: one of the greatest works of youth fiction ever written.

The LOTR books were, by contrast, never really all that great as books. I mean, they included fantastic adventures and great scenes and powerful characterizations, but they weren’t primarily works of literature; they were works of world-creation, of myth-making. So while I think Jackson fundamentally misunderstood or rejected some of thematic basics of that myth in his cinematic adaptations of LOTR (primarily, making the overarching story more about Aragorn and the triumph of men rather than about Frodo and the end of an age), he couldn’t really do any harm to it, any more than the movie The Avengers can do any harm to the grand myths of Thor and Loki. And moreover, they brought much of it to brilliant visual life, and along the way elaborated upon or extended the myth in important ways (replacing Glorfindel with Arwen in their film adaption of Fellowship; building up an important dynamic between Aragorn, Eowyn, and Wormtongue in their adaption of The Two Towers; etc.). So even when the movies dragged (and heavens, did the adaption of Return of the King ever drag, until Jackson plugged the holes and polished it up in the extended edition), I still loved them, and saw them as a contribution to Tolkien's overall legendarium. But with this film adaption of The Hobbit, all I can see is a wonderful work of literature–a real and genuine story, not a myth but a novel–being blown up and transformed and hooked up to a myth it has no narrative business being a part of.

I’m sure I’ll eventually see the film–all three of them, in all likelihood!–and maybe I’ll repent of this judgment entirely. Maybe Jackson and Company pulled off some wonderful alchemy in making this film adaption. But from the trailers I’ve seen, the reviews I’ve read, and really all the news going all the way back to the earliest development of the movie, I just can’t shake the feeling the Jackson's Hobbit is just doing it all wrong. Whereas this adaption, I'm sure, got it right:



(Update, via Facebook: Jacob Levy pithily comments that "The Hobbit pays homage to Tolkien the myth-maker at the expense of Tolkien the storyteller." Well said.)

All Creatures Great and Small

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

My father decided that we needed to learn how to work--and since he ran a feed mill, getting farm animals that we could feed relatively cheap seemed like the best idea. My father had been part of the world of alfalfa fields and cattle auctions since he was a child, but he wasn't a farmer, per se; just someone who knew and respected the social and economic place of farm life, and saw an opportunity to continue to make it a part of his children's lives. As so we got dairy cows, and starting around age nine, I and my older brother Daniel and older sister Samatha would milk them (usually two, sometimes three, sometimes only one) by hand, morning and night. Of course, that would include Christmas.

I'm a fan of holidays and traditions; I always have been, and probably always will. As a child, as a believer in Santa Claus (my father, I recall, informed Samatha and Daniel and I all together when I was seven or eight that there was no Santa Claus, and I insisted he was wrong, a position which I continue--with perhaps a little more philosophical sophistication--to maintain to this very day), I would attempt to talk to the cows on Christmas eve and Christmas day, in the hopes that they would speak to me, as the legend says they can on Christmas. But of course, they never did--not with words, anyway. And of course they wouldn't; they only speak at midnight, and I was always in bed by then. But I would still try.

God made the cows, and all creatures great and small. I'm certain that, as part of His creation, they are, in some way imperceptible to you and I, part of the joy of this season, as they are surely part of its stillness and darkness and its surprise as well. So it is right, I think, that we imaginatively bring them into our celebration, through song and story--and through this, my favorite Christmas poem. I've linked to it before, and I read it at our congregation's Christmas celebration yesterday. I wept like an idiot as I read it, because I wished, and probably always will wish, that I could be as steady and simple as Eddi, and his audience in this poem, and the animals that I tended on Christmas eves and days decades ago:

Eddi's Service, by Rudyard Kipling

(A.D. 687)

Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
For such as cared to attend.

But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
Though Eddi rang the bell.

"Wicked weather for walking,"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.
"But I must go on with the service
For such as care to attend."

The altar-lamps were lighted --
An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
And stared at the guttering flame.

The storm beat on at the windows,
The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
Pushed in through the open door.

"How do I know what is greatest,
How do I know what is least?
That is My Father's business,"
Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest.

"But -- three are gathered together --
Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.

And he told the Ox of a Manger
And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
That rode to Jerusalem.

They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
Eddi preached them The Word.

Till the gale blew off on the marshes
And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
Wheeled and clattered away.

And when the Saxons mocked him,
Said Eddi of Manhood End,
"I dare not shut His chapel
On such as care to attend."