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.

April is the Cruelest Month...

...especially for academics, and more particularly those who act the part of such. April is when the last, lingering hopes for the efforts expended during the school year are put to rest--grants very definitely not received, promotions very definitely denied, hires very definitely not made. Especially that last one. "Mixing memory and desire," indeed.

I've tried to avoid talking about my job situation of late, mostly because my writing about such in the past seemed to me (and to others) to be turning a little too spiteful, and a little too self-pitying. I've got a full-time position teaching material I love; I've got an office and books and benefits and colleagues, so what's to complain about? Well, the lack of security of course. But everyone lacks security these days, or so they say; what's so unusual about that? Nothing really--my complaint isn't any different from that of a thousand other visiting and adjuncting academics across the country. But still, it's hard. We really thought this was our year. After a couple of years of bureaucratic confusion and struggle, things seemed to be moving forward here at Arkansas State; the search was approved, the committee was formed, applications (including mine) were being reviewed. And in the meantime, I was having a very good year on the job market--more interviews than ever before, and at some pretty good schools. Good omens were abounding. We made plans, talked about moving, about buying a home, planting a garden, getting a better car. Things were looking up.

Then came the spring, and the rain. The other searches didn't pan out. The search here slowed, and then slowed further. Finally, it came to a halt entirely--disagreements over what direction the search should go, now that it really seemed like it was going to happen, came to a head; formerly unclear agendas and concerns were clarified. I don't have any real objections to those agendas; they all reflect legitimate concerns by people who want the best for their institution as they see it. But it is tiring, and not a little frustrating. After three years, I've come to really appreciate the students and faculty here; they're friends and people I admire and have high hopes for. I like the rhythm of the place, its small little niche in the society and economy of northeastern Arkansas, and my even smaller, but still valid, contribution to such. I'd like a career in academia to work out here--but then, I'd like such a career to work out just about anywhere. But you can only tread water for so long. We're looking to see what we can change, how we can respond to the new situation. I'm pretty sure we'll give academia one year--probably here, but maybe somewhere else. And then? Well, five years is probably about as good a go as anyone can reasonably expect to give academia today. Come next April, if we don't see any of that elusive security on the radar screen, we'll likely be on our way to Plan B.

But for now, I'll just have to keep playing the hand I'm dealt. I'm not out of the game yet, and it's almost May. Time to rinse out the rain, break out the shorts, and look for something fresh and new. I hear rumors that the beloved Invisible Adjunct may be returning to the blogosphere. Not a moment too soon, I say.

Democrats and Communitarians (But What Kind?)

Tuesday is my heaviest teaching day of the week, and so I missed out on an exchange which bubbled through the blogosphere yesterday, and is continuing today. Of course, I miss a lot of exchanges, but given how central the larger political and moral argument between libertarians and communitarians is to my heart, I'm sorry I didn't see this one unfold in real time.

Greg Wythe has the best round-up of the exchange so far; Amy Sullivan points to a piece by David Gerstein which argues that Democrats have lost--boy, this sounds familiar--the ability and willingness to aspire to any kind of moral authority: to affirm, in other words, specific value judgments. Or, more specifically, as Gerstein puts it: "We don't hesitate to judge people's beliefs, but we blanch at judging their behavior. That leaves us silent on big moral issues at a time of great moral uncertainty, and leaves the impression that we are the party of 'anything goes.'" He's right, of course, and Amy is correct to praise him for it, as well as to link to the Noam Scheiber piece which praises "communitarian," value-judgment-making Democrats. Predictably (and let it be said that predictability is often a virtue), Matt Yglesias disagrees, primarily focusing on the "prudishness" which he sees lurking behind the whole argument, especially given that--from his point of view--there is no evidence to support the idea that our (I say) crass, sexualized, commercialized culture is actually hurting anyone. Ed Kilgore, partially defending himself against Matt's critique, insists that "identifying with the parenting struggles of middle-class voters," which progressives need to do with they are ever going to counter the Republican's culture war juggernaut, has at least as much, if not more, to do with the way in which these messages are conveyed by our culture than by the messages themselves:

"As a parent of a teenager, I am not that worried that the ever-present marketers will turn him into a sex-addict or a sociopath; I'm more worried that he will turn into a total greedhead whose idea of the good life is stuff, and whose idea of citizenship is to demand a better personal cost-benefit ratio on his tax dollars....In terms of macro, as opposed to micro, factors, Matt repeatedly says the social indicators show the kids are all right, except they are getting mighty fat. We could have a debate over those indicators, if he'd specify them; and I'm sure they would be great comfort to the parents whose children's cohorts haven't quite yet entered the data base. But more generally, there are...a variety of reputable studies indicating the kids may not be all right, at least when they are exposed redundantly to violent, sexual, misogyinist, and hyper-commercial images."

Ed is absolutely on the money here, but Matt's not it buying it. To the extent that all Ed and Amy and all us other "progressive prudes" are talking about is making the V-chip available to parents, and taking other actions to make it easier for parents to withstand certain elements of the cultural marketplace and thereby have the "space" to inculcate the values they think necessary into their children, Matt's all for it--but he doesn't think that's where the arguments which he's responding to will end. And he's right; they shouldn't end there, and this is something that Democrats who (I think rightly) choose to experiment with the "communitarian" label need to be willing to respond to. The end result of such experimentation is liberals and progressives who, like conservative Republicans today, are willing to make judgments so that, in Ed's words, "voters [can] figure out whether [progressive] politicians actually believe (a) there are principles more important than politics, and (b) there is such a thing as right and wrong." And this exactly what Matt, and liberals like him, don't want, because it goes entirely against what he sees the purpose of politics to be--namely, to limit society and provide resources so that people can exercise as much liberty as possible. From this perspective, the last thing you want is for any politician to take a definite cultural or moral stand, save in regard to the most universal and minimal of principles. Why? Because, says Matt, "[o]nce you abandon the principled position that it's not the appropriate role of a politician to be telling people what music they should be listening to, it becomes impossible to defend the existence of anything without endorsing it's point-of-view." And Matt, who--like so many of us--enjoys music and movies and art which includes content which in the real world many might well find highly distasteful, doesn't want to get into that fight. Do progressives, Matt asks, want to engage in a "values debates" with social or religious conservatives who find "pop cultural products which indicate that gay people are okay" to be distasteful? Of course they don't, he concludes. QED.

The best possible response I can make to Matt is one I wrote way back in November, when I was on my first (and, I suppose, continuing) "religion and the left" rampage:

"[T]he argument isn't that getting progressives in the Democratic party to recognize and incorporate as valid the moral concerns of America's religious voters means electing..."scolds-in-chief"....The argument, rather, is whether or not progressives are going to express a willingness to scold, or at least a sympathy for those who feel it necessary to do so. In other words, it's not whether or not the Democrats can realize that, say, abortion or violent video games or Sex in the City has got to go; it's whether they can realize that there are possible worlds into which such things ought not go, and that respecting the popular wishes of the people involves a recognition of the maintenance, or even the potential emergence, of such a world. What is at stake in the culture war, if you want to call it that, isn't the content of the culture so much as the context within which people may determine their cultural environment, and whether in the eyes of the state they will be legitimated or marginalized through doing so....Limits are useful things, and even if you prefer to reject the communitarian instantiation of any one set of (religious, national, cultural) limits, the act of limiting, drawing boundaries, and (yes) scolding transgressors of such, is essential to allowing a sense of affection for one's lived context to develop. If the power of the federal judiciary or the media undermines the legitimacy of such identity and context-establishment, then there will be hell to pay...and all progressive causes will suffer."

If Noam and Ed and Amy and others are going to (I hope, I pray) continue to push for liberals to acknowledge and take seriously the "communitarian" factor of progressive politics, then they're going to have to accept Matt's challenge, and ask themselves if they are willing to follow through on what the popular cultivation and affirmation of values (including religious and moral values) on the part of the government and politicians will entail. It will entail, very possibly, drawing lines and limits (if not necessarily, always, laws--but sometimes it will mean that too) in response the serious concerns of groups of people who feel bounded to certain principles, commandments, or ways of life. It won't do to simply be solicitous of various discrete aspects of our society's otherwise marginalized middle-class and working-class morality; it will mean allowing for the cultivation of a "worldview which makes certain [moral] perspectives and principles inherent to [one's] thinking about political matters." So you may end up condemning bad art, or even acting to limit the availability or production of bad art (at some times, in some places, in some ways), simply because it's bad. The fact that it may have been freely produced and freely consumed art is important, but secondary to the discussion when framed in this way.

I guess the real point is: are the Democrats to be encouraged to merely leaven their liberalism with some strategic communitarianism, or should they be encouraged to see populist, progressive politics as linked to communitarian priorities in some key ways? My preference for the latter is obvious; for others, that remains to be seen.

John Paul II, Authority, and the Left

Well, Pope John Paul II was buried this morning, so I suppose if I'm going to say anything about this pontiff I need to say it now. Not that much (perhaps too much) hasn't already been said, especially by people like myself who engage in political and moral theorizing. As Lee at Verbum Ipsum commented, everyone "want[s] to claim as renowned a personage as John Paul II as one of their own--as favoring their own particular political program." He provides some good links, and a causal search of the internet will turn up dozens, if not hundreds more. The liberal pope, the conservative pope, the pacifist pope, the anti-communist pope. E.J. Dionne put it well in The New Republic: JPII's personal sense of philosophical "consistency [did] not necessarily match that of the world that is judging him."

I think the one thing I've read about JPII this week that has helped me the most in putting his spiritual vision of the human person--a vision that mandated a defense of the weak and defenseless within a context of religious authority, family unity, sexual fidelity, political freedom, social justice and anti-materialism--into perspective has been my friend Damon Linker's short piece in TNR; for Damon, the Pope's central legacy was one of "absolutism." It is a valuable and good, perhaps even necessary thing, to hear an absolute call to particular moral standard; as Damon wrote, "after a century of mass murder, John Paul's unconditional defense of human dignity cannot fail to impress." But absolutisms "also distort our vision, obscuring the exceedingly complicated, even paradoxical, character of morality itself," leading to the possibility that those inspired by absolutes will (like some of those who called attention to themselves during the Schiavo case) reject the necessary steps of self-government in favor of more direct action. For some such as these, the "lawful course of action--the slow, difficult, and possibly futile task of persuading Florida voters and their representatives to change the laws of their state so that a similar situation would not arise in the future"--will be considered "simply unacceptable." And so, this Pope, to the extent that he saw no need to temper his absolutist religious convictions when involving himself or the body of doctrine he promulgated in political matters, represented another instance of the threat of moral fervor to democracy which liberals have rightly concerned themselves with for centuries. (And this is no idle concern; there were those who called for "extra-legal action...up to and including forcible resistance" in the case of Terri Schiavo.)

I liked Damon's piece, not because I fully agreed with it (I'm far more a populist, including a religious populist, than Damon), but because I think it clarified the issues so very well. Similarly to how another (much more harsh) questioning of a Catholic religious figure helped me appreciate that figure more fully: Christopher Hitchens's infamous diatribe against Mother Teresa. As I wrote a long time back, it's quite possible that all of Hitchens's allegations--that Mother Teresa took money from blackmailers and dictators and criminals, that she ignored the consequences of her own teachings in a monomaniacal quest to serve and save the poor in their own state (rather than working to improve their state), that she tolerated and even encouraged a cult of personality that saved her from criticism (and audits), etc., etc.--are completely true...and yet they still wouldn't add up to what he claimed they did. Why? Because Hitchens has mortal concerns, and "all mortal concerns are, by definition, incomplete. Holiness, by contrast, is wholeness. If one wholly adored God [as Mother Teresa plainly did], then the moral complications of discerning between what some deserve and others do not, of working out compromises when faced with hard moral choices, of deciding between just and unjust wars, indeed of all the necessary vicissitudes of ordinary life, would not trouble you one bit--and...that describes Mother Teresa's lack of care for the 'real world,' or 'the big picture,' or 'the long term' very, very well." Similarly, one may see (as I wrote in a more explicitly religious context) John Paul's absolutism as an expression of his prophetic stature, his determination to address the world and all its elements entirely and only through a prism of righteous doctrine and higher, holy laws.

Of course, the Pope, whether a prophet or not, nonetheless has a position of political influence in our world very different from Mother Teresa's, and thus perhaps can be faulted for not taking responsibility for his absolutisms, in a way that a Mother Teresa, explicitly concerned as she was with living out a consecrated life, ought not be. That's not a debate that can be easily settled, and I certainly don't think I can do so here and now; wiser minds than mine have struggled to work out the best accounts of how, and if, moral absolutism and religious populism ought to be accounted for in connection with the liberal prudence necessary for democratic self-government. But I do think something needs to be said about how the disavowal of absolutes, particularly the kind advocated by JPII, has done great damage to the left in the U.S., and beyond.

Think back to the Schiavo affair again for a moment. As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I was disturbed at the warped and lopsided "culture of life" rhetoric employed by many, perhaps, most of those who surrounded the Schindler family. But this wasn't the whole story. Towards the end, you saw an interesting collection of leftists and progressives showing up on the Schindlers' side of the barricades: Ralph Nader. Nate Hentoff. Even Rev. Jesse Jackson stopped by to pray. These guys are hardly reputable among liberals today, of course; Mark A.R. Kleiman lumped them together with a host of extreme conservatives and denounced them all as "dimwitted self-promoting busybodies." Now, I have my own tortuous history with Nader, and heaven knows that Jesse Jackson is little more than an ambulance-chaser these days. Still, the vehemence poured upon Nader's head for having taken this action is revealing--revealing not just of how much mainstream liberals today still loathe Nader for his actions in 2000, but also revealing of just how little connect there is between the presumptions he thinks to be necessary for social justice, and what most other liberals today assume. What most self-described progressives call "wingnuttery" is, in truth, a concern for authority--including, most crucially, the authority of certain principles as embedded in cultural presumptions. You don't, in the minds of these and other leftists, achieve progress solely through the legal establishment of a plurality of neutral spaces wherein one may (hopefully) achieve egalitarian improvement, though the prudential argument for the preservation of at least a little neutral space is strong. Nonetheless, it is insufficient; such a focus never addresses who actually holds power over and in the midst of those spaces. (In the case of Terri Schiavo: was it judges, or doctors, or a husband with unclear motives, or who?) What you need is an engagement with the whole culture, a popular demand for its conformity with justice as dictated by (you guessed it) absolutes, not merely the availability of free choice (as the law judged Terri Schiavo, via her husband Michael, to have chosen). This is part of the reason why Nader has never seen much importance in mobilizing people against traditional views on behalf of abortion rights or "gonadal politics." Is that "authoritarian"? Well, yes--insofar as one may speak of "working-class authoritarianism" as Christopher Lasch and others have. Or one could just call it "communitarian," in the sense of insisting that self-government rests primarily upon our attendance to communal values--which for many millions, means a "culture of life"--and not simply the private space we afford citizens in the choosing of such. Some suggest that certain Democrats are coming around to this position, meaning perhaps that the larger context (if not the specific content) of the arguments and actions that have alienated folks like Nader from the Democratic party as a whole is finally being recognized. If so, I'm delighted--and saddened that it has taken so long, because that exactly point was at the heart of Pope John Paul's critique all along.

Nader and JPII in the same sentence? I'm not sure how you can think otherwise, when one reads in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) about how the arms trade, global trade practices, and international debt are linked as "structures of sin," representing "modern forms of 'imperialism'" that are, in fact, "forms of idolatry: of money, ideology, class, technology." In that encyclical, he calls for not only for a more just distribution of resources, but a reconsideration of our whole approach to development, given that private property itself must be understood to function under a "social mortgage," one tied to its just and righteous use. Centesimus Annus is too frequently taken to be a post-Cold War vindication of certain right-wing readings of liberalism, and even those conservatives who take issue with this obvious misinterpretation tend to see the Pope's vision primarily in terms of "freedom." But if that is so, how to account for his explicit insistence upon the necessity of "educational and cultural work," including "the education of consumers in the responsible use of their power of choice," so that the principle of honest work may be connected with those "collective goods" necessary for righteous development? No, for this man, democracy and freedom were basically a means, important primarily because of what they make possible: the realization of a spiritual, meaning-full, non-materialistic culture, and that means a culture that never treats human beings as merely "material"--no matter if they are young or old, rich or poor, or for that matter, a condemned murderer, an enemy soldier, in a persistent vegetative state or even a fetus. For a great many conservatives in America today, a (unfortunately usually quite partial) attachment to these spiritual absolutes is common, but the ability to make it part of a socio-economic and cultural argument is lacking. Whereas for many committed to the old popular, social visions of justice on the left, such spirituality may be occasionally absent--but more importantly, the absolute cultural context is not.

A bunch of old friends and I have been talking about JPII this week; one of them, Matt Stannard--who, like me, thinks the way the "bourgeois parties" in the U.S. today talk about issues of life and death is an example of "moral myopia"--took me to task in an e-mail, challenging the way I apparently give a pass to authoritarian structures like that embodied by the Pope in order to respond to injustice. "The Pope's anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist messages emerged in a context of institutional power that made them next to useless," he wrote; "the Nazis hated capitalism and modernity too, remember. That didn't make them progressive. You cannot be truly egalitarian while simultaneously believing in (and in this case being the living embodiment of) spiritual hierarchy and patriarchy." And he is right that the argument I'm making here, for a left that is more "authoritarian" in a popular sense, engages in some easy equivocations. Just because egalitarianism includes both A and B, and X is both A and B, does not mean that X is egalitarian. Very probably, I'm reaching too far, and ignoring too much, in trying to sustain my argument about JPII (perhaps the paucity of spokespeople for the "left traditionalist" position has resulted in a kind of desperation on my part). Nonetheless, I do think that acknowledging the way in which a spiritually hierarchical and patriarchal power--even one whose own teachings cannot avoid the accusation of culpability, as is the case for this pontiff and the AIDS crisis in Africa, which his preaching against birth control, and hence condom use, did not cause but certainly exacerbated--can nonetheless incorporate or make possible a certain kind of progressivism in the midst of modern life is something which many on the left (which so often seems to be caught up in celebrating a kind of acultural, unembedded autonomy) need to do. If we agree that we need a comprehensive cultural vision, doesn't that mean we need to invest authority elsewhere besides in the liberty of the self-motivated individual, or at least partially so? And if so, can we really imagine an authentic, historically realized, cultural entity or movement capable of exercising such authority which simultaneously is without any kind of exclusions or hierarchy? I'm doubtful. This is not to excuse all the cultural forms that religions and traditions take--after all, the whole point is to be able to mount a larger, more comprehensive critique of the practices which reflect such principles. But it is to acknowledge that the best basis of progress is one which embeds certain absolutes--principles to progress towards--in a protected, even privileged cultural or institutional space. Martin Luther King would not have been nearly so successful in shaming America for its treatment of black people if the American polity was not so communally devoted to the promotion of certain moral virtues. And that is what JPII, and the culture of life he advocated, was at least in part about--the authoritative, even "absolutist," revealing or constructing of a principled culture that the peoples of the world could devote themselves to, and by so doing progress. As I see it, that's a big part of what being on the left has always, and must always, mean; if liberals have forgotten that, and JPII's example can serve as a reminder, then this is an argument worth making.

A related point: does this mean that Pope John Paul II, and the left I'd like to see, to whatever extent I'm right that aspects of their cultural message of dignity and equality overlap, are illiberal? Partly, yes, though both Ross Douthat and Richard Neuhaus are probably more correct to describe JPII's philosophy as demanding an ongoing critique of, and hence engagement with, Western modernity and liberalism. Still, I think Matt Yglesias's assessment of what being an "absolutist" means in a liberal environment is basically correct--I wouldn't go so far as to say that freedom is a complete non-starter for such thinkers, but it certainly isn't constitutive of much of an argument all on its own. (And he's similarly correct that "culture of life" absolutists need to see that primarily valuing the freedom to privately choose between a plurality of goods is not, in itself, a declaration of relativism--a conclusion which this pontiff quite explicitly did not affirm, in contrast to some of his more aggressively antimodern forebearers.) John Holbo adds a wrinkle to this analysis of absolutism: clearly, many an advocate of absolute principles don't necessarily deny the reality of others' divergent, even plural, principles, and hence the importance of the freedom which makes such possible. But, in the end, I suspect all that observation tells us is that there are, on the one hand, many a philosophical or habitual liberal for whom the witness of people like the Pope has induced an inchoate longing for absolute principle, and on the other hand, many an "absolutist" (of one stripe or another) for whom the liberal recognition of plurality is embraced as prudent; "adjectival" liberals, you might say. Such prudential yet absolutist engagement is, I think, an example of a leftism which has, to our loss, all but disappeared from American politics, occasionally resurrected today by folks on the margins of liberal politics but just as quickly dropping beneath the surface again. It needn't be that way, or at least so I wish. A Mother Teresa, or a leftist who aspires to non-political purity, can afford complete illiberality. But that wasn't, I think, the quality of this Pope's absolutist call, and that is a lesson for the left to learn. I wish I was confident it could.

After Schiavo

I'm going out of town for a few days, and so will probably miss the Schiavo endgame. Perhaps it won't be the end--at this moment the Schindlers and their lawyers are no doubt rushing to the Supreme Court, in hopes of overturning what the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said early this morning: namely, despite the clear intent of the legislation written by Congress and signed by the President over the weekend, there remains no good reason to challenge the decisions of the state courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will decide differently; perhaps not. Either way, I'm sure I'll hear all about it from our hotel room.

My suspicion is that the Supreme Court will split 5-4 or 6-3 against intervening, and that will be the end of it. That'll make me said, let there be no doubt. The post I put up Monday was mainly addressed to 1) the peculiarities of this given case, and 2) my frustrations with the way I think a great many, probably most, professed advocates of a "culture of life" in the U.S. allow their message to be warped and unevenly applied (the Schiavo case is not the cause of this, but a symptom, and perhaps also a contributor). My view is that our default decisions in disputed cases such as these should never be one of death. Accordingly, the best possible solution I can come up with in the Schiavo case is for the husband to let go (since he plainly has, in a not insignificant sense, already done so); however, I can see no way for that to be accomplished under current law. I personally don’t see a grave constitutional crisis emerging from what Congress and President Bush have done and said over the last few days, but I also don’t see much good being done. As I said before, I prefer to see contested issues like this played out in the political rather than the legal arena--but I do not see how the federal government can do anything to get into that arena. The one thing they definitely cannot do is write some sort of ex post facto law undoing the process by which the state courts have handed Michael the authority to make decisions for Terri. And so unless someone comes up with some new constitutional angle for re-examining the medical evidence, the issue (and the woman) is as good as dead. I would prefer that the matter not rest on that issue and that issue alone--I'd like, instead, to talk about our responsibility to the dying, and to what degree the participants in this case have shown such. But at this point, it's beyond me to see such a discussion can be made applicable.

I hardly ever agree with Charles Krauthammer anymore, but I liked his column this morning. Not his legal analysis so much as his legal recommendations:

"Given our lack of certainty, given that there are loved ones prepared to keep her alive and care for her, how can you allow the husband to end her life on his say-so? Because following the sensible rules of Florida custody laws, conducted with due diligence and great care over many years in this case, this is where the law lead....There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among loved ones differently--by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life and is committed to support it. Call it Terri's law."

This may go too far--but perhaps some variation of it would work well. I would still want to give priority to the spouse, but there is also a great possibility of conflicts of interest between spouses, perhaps greater than that between parents and children. One of my fellow bloggers, in a discussion of this case, put it this way:

"Besides having a smart and loving wife, I have two smart and loving parents and seven smart and loving siblings. If my wife is unable to persuade any of those nine good people that she’s right [that he should be allowed to die if he is in a persistent vegetative state and has not made his own wishes clear], then she’s probably not right....I would trust a group more than a lone individual for such an important decision. For those reasons I...[structure it so that my] wife plus one a majority, which still offers a strong spousal privilege (2 votes would defeat 8, so long as hers was one of the two)."

Of course, most people don't have such a united and responsible family as this fellow has. But then again, absent such an active and interested family group, conflicts between family members probably wouldn't arise in the first place. (The Schindlers definitely united, responsible, and interested!) It wouldn't cover all the bases, but it would be a start towards a more responsibly grounded culture of life, rather than one driven by hysterics.

Also, don't miss Marshall Wittmann today either.