Thoughts on Things That Have Come and Gone

Lord willing and the creeks don't rise, I am moving to New York (upstate, that it is) in less than a week. I have been places before: I spent a few weeks in Paris, I've traveled on both coasts of Canada, I've been to conferences in southern California and the Rustbelt, and there was a brief gig as a farmhand and cowboy in rural Virginia. But Moscow, Idaho has been "home" for twenty-two years. Statistically, the chances are that there will not be another locale which I will call "home" for a longer period of time. Most people would call this turning the page on another chapter of their lives, but for me, it is more like turning the page on Book I of my life.

I'm not old. (I'm still in my early twenties.) But that doesn't mean I'm younger than the world that we live in now; I'm actually quite a bit older than it (or at least I have lived long enough to remember when it was not.) This brave new world that I am referring to is the world of the computer, of mass communication, of globalization. I remember a time when I had trouble believing that the Soviet Union could be breaking apart; that America could want any president other than George H. W. Bush; that history was the last victim of itself, consigned to the archives where only those who made a living by reinterpreting it bothered to follow. I remember I time when I could not remember where I was when the World Trade Centers came down.

This world is a new world; or else I am like a man who turned around in Socrates's hypothetical cave and saw what had been all along, though he was unaware of it. (It is not that this is an impossibility; I avoided getting an email address for as long as I could; I was twenty-one when I finally obtained a cellular phone.) In this new world, it has become easier to keep track of people, which is why no one bothers to do it anymore. We have advanced to a point where it has become polite to lie by saying "I'll keep in touch" but perhaps impolite to annul that lie by actually keeping in touch.

But, for all of that, the frontier still beckons. The world can still be remade, but not until it remakes us first. And, if the primary facet of this current world has been trivialization, what will the next era bring I wonder?

Religion Just Keeps Getting More and More Ecumenical

Interesting statistics garnered via wikipedia: In the United Kingdom, approximately 70% of the population identifies as Christian; however, only about 35% of the population believes that a personal God exists. But this may not be as great an accomplishment as that of the Church of Sweden which manages to discuss its general credo on its English website without once mentioning God (even though the web-designer does quote a bishop who mentions the Holy Spirit briefly.)

Notes on the Death of Dr. Tiller

Because there has been so much buzz on the death of Dr. Tiller, I thought that I would throw my own two cents into the hat. Not that I have a lot that is new to say, but it is worth reminding whomever your readers are of it, even if your only reader is yourself.

I should begin by noting that I do not find myself feeling particularly sorry of George Tiller, though I am sorry that his family now has to go through the distress of losing him. If the woman's health was at grave risk, then a few of the abortions he performed may have been justifiable, but, all in all, what he did was atrocious and, in a fully civilized and moral society, would have brought down upon him the full weight and discipline of the law.

But therein lies the problem: No society is fully civilized and all find ways to let their small acts of utilitarian immorality find justification through one premise or another. It serves an apparatus of power, but no matter how corrupt the apparatus is, it still holds up the body. Acts like those of the lone gunman who murdered George Tiller are not reprehensible because they are committed against this or that individual, but rather because they are committed against the social apparatus as a whole. An assault on anyone is an assault on everyone.

I have heard some--not pro-lifers but rather libertarians and "progressives" playing DARE--argue that an unjust law is no law at all (and, by implication, that individual citizens should engage in vigilantism where the government fails to do so.) This is completely wrong. A law is a law, unjust or not and, if they play the History card (what about slavery?) then I say just because I would have supported Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Anti-Secessionist policies does not necessarily mean that I should have been obliged to condone the Nat Turner Rebellion or to stand beside John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Even the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s had the law on their side when it came to brass tax (see Brown v. Board of Education.)

In short, I see no reason why I should not be sorry for Dr. Tiller's passing (if, indeed, he did provide unnecessary late-term abortions) while, at the same time, hoping that Scott Roeder, his murderer, spends the rest of his life in prison or, perhaps, joins the dwindling few on death row.

Initial Reactions to the Ensign + Sanford Thing

With both Ensign and Sanford realizing that their political futures are in shambles, one has to ask, are there any Republicans who are not having an affair now? If so, please stand up. Of course, calling for Sanford to resign might not be the best idea now. His state is not in such good shape so changing governors does not seem like such a good plan (unless he disappears again.) As for Ensign, it would probably be best for everyone if he resigned from the senate. After he so vigorously crusaded for the resignation of President Clinton and Senator Craig, what can one say but "he has no credibility now"?

Thoughts on Totalitarianism in the Twenty-First Century

I've been exchanging emails with a friend recently on the subject of government, culture, totalitarianism, etc. Here's the latest thing I added to the mix for anyone who's interested:

I wanted to read "Fahrenheit 451" before responding. I have done so. Bradbury, like Huxley before him, was very prescient in seeing the threat of passive despotism in a society; by passive despotism, I don't mean the type the seeks to create a New Man, but rather a variety of despotism that is created to govern once the New Man has been created. Of course, because this sort of despotism adapts to cultural change rather than forcing the culture to change according to its abstract goals--as in countries like the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China--the illiberalism of the system does not manifest itself to any but the outsiders of the society.

The claim that "we are left with democracy" I think is true, with some qualification, but the most important follow-up question, for me, would be how we are to protect democracy from becoming a tyranny of the mob. This question isn't a new one; nearly two centuries ago, de Tocqueville wrote of how democracy tended toward passive totalitarianism: "In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them. It is not that he has to fear an auto-da-fe, but he is the butt of mortifications of all kinds and persecutions every day . . . He yields, he finally bends under the effort of each day and returns to silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth" (244).

This, for me, underlines one of the fundamental flaws of democracy: It trivializes recognition. Dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Natan Sharansky could oppose autocratic regimes, and, in cases like these, their imprisonment confirmed their relevance to the cause of freedom. But what about parents in present-day Germany who are imprisoned for homeschooling their children? What about people like Liinda Gibbons in Canada who are imprisoned for protesting permissive abortion policies? In cases like this, the abuse of power would seem apparent to most classical liberals and conservatives, but the abuse is not inconsistent with the General Will of the nations whose governments perpetrate the action.

To summarize, totalitarianism failed in the West in the twentieth century because partisan elites tried to create a New Man through deeply flawed belief systems (such as communism and Nazism). In the twenty-first century, we may very well see a totalitarianism with all of the opposite characteristics: absent will be the near-religious devotion that either of these two ideologies inspired in its adherents; there need be no talk of revolution, culture or even the New Man because under such a totalitarianism all of these could be assumed. A government does not need to create a New Man if he already exists. The disturbing part, though, is that the success or failure of this sort of totalitarianism is, from what I can tell, indeterminate.

Movie Review: Suburbia vs. Artifice

Intellectuals hate suburbia. I have never understood why. Perhaps the suburbs are antisocial when compared to the city, perhaps the communities are planned, but then what may appear as antisocial to some is just plain privacy to others. Apart from that, there is something intimately appealing about being able to build one's own independent if also small kingdom apart from the milieu of civilization. (After all, isn't the key to American culture the dialectic between civilization and the frontier.)

"Revolutionary Road" is no exception to the self-justifying slag pile which is the genre of antisuburban art. The movie clearly hates suburbia, but it is difficult to articulate why. Is suburbia merely an artifice to keep the machine of society running? You wouldn't guess it, had you the free Wheelers as neighbors. They seem to make no reservations about ripping one another apart. (Though, given the acting in this film, you might think that suburbia was a bit hammy if you visisted the neighborhood.)

Apparently the Wheelers, like so many other (fictional) bored suburban couples before them thought that they might actually make a difference in the world (and were fortunate enough not to live by their desire for recognition--who knows how many people have let their children starve to death from neglect in some of those bohemian-style art colonies.) The real problem was that they just couldn't shake it off; if not, their lives might have been happy, or at least more peaceful. After all, isn't that what artifice is for?

After having written in this, I should acknowledge that I can't speak with any degree of authority as to whether suburbia is or is not miserable. I lived as un-suburban a life as anyone in a small town could live. My parents were not particularly radical, but there was no more radical place in the state of Idaho than that street on which I grew up: Elm Street, fraternity row, in a house across the street from a brown-stone fraternity, juxtaposing a Southern revival TriDelt sorority and a graduate student apartment complex. Maybe this is the reason why suburbia has always had an appeal--I have never desired to live in suburbia, but there are aspects of it which I admire. However fraudulent it may be, there's no establishment which is much realer and it is much realer than some.

Why I Am Not an Agrarian

This paragraph is taken somewhat out of context, but I think that it's a pretty good summation of my uneasiness with traditional (i.e. paleo-, though this term is a bit impolite) conservatism:

There’s always been something unrealistically romantic about too much emphasis on place and memory in America. Not so far from where I live there was a town -- Cassville, GA -- that, by 1860, was extremely well settled, had several serious institutions of learning, and certain sorts of aristocratic traditions that are still remembered by those who care about that stuff. It wasn’t even there until 1840 -- it was founded in the wake of the pretty anti-communitarian Cherokee removal that’s part of our wonderful southern heritage -- and it was devastated by the Civil War. Community came and went with almost blinding speed, as it has done often in our country’s history. (Consider also, if you want, how quickly the Cherokees transformed themselves into good [slaveholding sometimes], agrarian Americans, with their really deep traditions both adapting and sometimes disappearing.)

Peter Lawler, Postmodern Conservative

This is not to say that I completely object to the agrarian ideals of place, belonging, connection, but it is a telling fact that most of the famous agrarians did not choose this life, even when they could have done so--Wendell Berry, for instance, is a farmer and lives off the land, but he does not have to depend on the land for his sustenance. (And neither did his father, from whom he inherited the land.) But Wendell Berry is the closest that individuals come to living up to their ideals. Many other agrarian idealists are professors, writers, doctors, etc. Men who farm as a hobby. Or not at all.

I would say it is inappropriate to be unfairly judgmental. After all, men like these are necessary for the message of agrarianism to reach the people. But most farmers I have met are hardly distinguishable from the rest of us, once they cross the city's boarders, and it is moments when I meet the real farmer they I begin to suspect that agrarianism is a romantic notion which distracts us from the crooked timber of . . . reality.