Spitcraft

This is a subject near and dear to me, though sadly neglected on this blog. It is at least tangentially related to the subject of some email correspondence between Boethius and I some years back, something we christened Spiritualism, to be contrasted with philosophical materialism. It was a bit difficult to summarize the train of thought of the Spiritualists (abbreviated "Spits"), except to say that the epistemological and ontological foundation of an act of a person, combined with intent and experiencing the consequences, is at least as strong as the objective, "real" world.

In any case, I believe that we are at or near the end of the "Cartesian template" for human progress. This is a historical phenomenon that started, oh, 10 to 40 years ago, but in an indirect way it is very important to the current economic crisis. The process of development in technology continues, but the willingness of people to pay for its accomplishments has gone way down. Our economy will continue to struggle for at least as long as it appears that there are no good options for smart, energetic people to devote their time to.

This book, Shopcraft as Soulcraft, has been the latest big thing on the alternative Right for a while. I haven't read it but I suspect that I would be sympathetic with its thesis. But I don't want to overstate the case that the ideas in it will serve as the foundation for economic revival. It may be that bourgeois America will escape its cubicles. If it does it will be for the sake of the workers' well-being. But that's only half the equation. There will also be a revolution on the consumer side as well, something that creates a sense of urgency. But the consumer is feeling poor, and will be wary of buying the latest brand of snake oil. The consumer has to go through a phase social or spiritual development as well. Only then will he know what's worth spending money on.

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt IV

Here's an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There's a reason for this. - Kevin Williamson in National Review

And All For One

There's a grab bag of things worth mentioning regarding Boethius' latest.

The first thing is that I am very little conflicted about loyalty to America, and in particular that it constitutes one polity. There are a lot of ways to think about this, but I look at it from in a very practical way. No matter what the difference in weather, food, or accents, when I fly from Chicago to Los Angeles it's still the same country. It's not only about the formalities of passport control, but for me at least it really does feel that way too. But in flying from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, you land in a different country. It's as simple as that.

Elaborating on the particular loyalties of dissident conservatives, it's worth contrasting them to the mainstream Right. For the mainstream Right, there is a nexus of political loyalties that's fairly well understood at the gut level. The mainstream Right is connected on one end with the Republican political establishment, and on the other to Greater Red State America. This is in addition to the general patriotic loyalty to America in general. This is important because it creates the possibility of understood premises in a conversation with a mainstream conservative. For the dissident conservatives, leaving aside any questions of loyalty to America in general, their secondary political positive loyalties are quite murky. Even if one of them claimed to be loyal to paleoconservatism or Crunchy Conservatism, the objects of such loyalty are too fragmented to count. Therefore there tends to be a hint of sophistry in their arguments: it's always a little too vague just who's interest they're arguing for.

The libertarians are an interesting case: to the extent they exist as part of the Right at all, they function as dissident conservatives some of the time and mainstream conservatives the rest. Politically speaking I think their biggest issues have to do with organization, which come to think of it is sort of related to loyalty in their case.

About Bin Laden et al, I don't believe they fear being the victim of persecution by the state for the sake of religion. Instead they intend to be the religious persecutors themselves, through the state or whatever means of power they can use. We can hope, that the physical and cultural barriers between us and them mean that we can protect ourselves from them easier than some would have us believe. IMO that's an interesting, highly contingent judgment call. By contrast, the question of loyalty is this circumstance ought to be trivial.

Placing Loyalty

Koz writes, "one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us."

I am quite happy to agree on this point, and it is perhaps the principal weakness in thoroughgoing libertarianism. I suppose Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker would argue that a libertarian is free to be loyal to whatever he wishes and it is not their business to force their loyalty toward something else (mainly The State).

I've often argued that libertarianism is a bit like the Physics 101 problems sets in which we are allowed to posit a frictionless surface for the sake of learning about how acceleration works. This is very helpful either at the beginning of one's physics career, or at times, when a thought-experiment is needed to test some other highly complex set of variables. Libertarianism, in my opinion, should get more attention from the right, but in the end, policy decisions will have to deal with the real world, which includes relationships that libertarianism does not always take into account.

That said, I think that a principal problem with the Republican party is that the manly loyalty so yearned for by Koz (and myself) is assumed to be directed toward the Party and toward America. Now we should be loyal to our friends and to our homeland. But who are our friends, and what constitutes our homeland? I personally have always had difficulty on a gut level feeling like I'm somehow part of the same patria as Bostonians and Los Angelenos. As for the Republican party, well, I agree with them on _some_ issues, but actually fewer and fewer. Does manliness consist in simply being loyal for the sake of being loyal? Or are commitments born of some other considerations?

Thank you for the kind Indepedence Day wishes. I am most grateful to live in a country where I am free to practice my religion, under a Constitution that ranks among the great political documents of history. Let's hope it makes a comeback!

Update

After completing this post, I came upon this excellent article, comparing the libertarian views of Ayn Rand's The Atlas with the anarchist views of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It reminded me of some things to clarify in what I posted last night. That I am more in sympathy with Tolkien than Rand explains much of my critique of libertarianism. When asked my political views, I normally respond 'classical liberal and subsidiarist; when that's not possible, I'm a monarchist'. "The Return of the King" is a necessity in Middle Earth because of the ravages of Sauron's forces and the lingering dangers unleashed by it. But when peace returns, political decision-making devolves to the lowest possible authority necessary--what I mean by 'subsidiarist', a term borrowed from the Catholic Church's philosophy of government, post-Vatican II.

Returning to the issue of loyalty, then, I believe that our loyalties must start small and be based in loyalty to family and clan, friends, neighborhoods, co-workers and villages, and only through these mediating structures to larger-scale political groupings. Party politics seems to me to be a huge problem. We see that Republicans are pondering throwing overboard their pro-life principles for the 'greater good' of...of...beating the Democrats? What about the loyalty shown by the religious right for the past thirty years?

Faced with the menace of communism, there was plausible reason to rally 'round the cause of national security, meaning allowing for an expansion of a larger-scale political decision-making scheme. I am not at all convinced that terrorism presents the same necessity; if anything Bin Laden, et al, hate not our freedoms, but the looming specter of total state domination to the exclusion of religious principles. I dare say were we more free, they might respect us more, not less. In fact, I don't find that we are all that free politically. If I want to change something in my own Chicago neighborhood, well, I have no real recourse but to try and placate the higher powers of Daley's cabal or maneuver around implacable federal laws. And all this may, and often is, easily defeated by persons willing to participate in the corruption that such large-scale power entails.

Returning to loyalty: why be loyal to one's neighborhood when the prospect of real spoils looms if we forsake the neighborhood and remove ourselves to the abstracted levels of City Hall? Mutatis mutandis, if we go for the real golden goose of federal tax moneys and power? What sort of persons will wind up in national politics we can predict based on this, and these sorts of persons are not normally going to be ones that will elicit my sympathy, much less loyalty.

Long Live the Male

"[F]or men in America, the only plausible ideal of conduct is the idea of the Gentleman. What else is there? The Rock Star? The Cowboy? Norman Mailer's White Negro? The Underground Man? Huck Finn?" -- James Burnham to Jeffrey Hart

Well, let's take the winding road today. This has been overtaken by events a little bit. But sometime last week, when Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska and it appeared that she would remain so for a while, Stacy McCain kicked the hornet's nest again. I won't dwell too much on homosexuality here, except to note that this is actually tangentially related to my complaints against the dissident conservatives, relating in particular to the modern male sex role.

It took a while for me to figure this out, but one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us.

Men without loyalties outside themselves are perceived to be weak, and men who are perceived to be weak are not respected by other men, in particular me. This is particularly topical right now because the current economic travails are subtly affecting our perceptions of sex roles in ways that might actually help the much-beleagured bourgeois American male.

For at least as long as I've been alive, there's been a certain empty boorishness inside the typical American male. Not that all of us are mindless jerks, but most of us wouldn't know how to be a genuine article gentleman even if we tried (this applies men of just about every race and ecnomic class, btw). In fact the very concept of gentleman has shifted to reflect this very fact. Instead of referring to a man who serves as a visible marker of civilization by virtue of his standards in dress, bearing, and manners, we now speak of a gentleman as a good-hearted mensch in his personal relations. I'm sure it's possible to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is, but it's there nonetheless.

With the current economic crisis however, the bourgeois American male is challenged to do things that he actually has a chance of being able to do, and that are worthy of accomplishment. Until very recently, it was possible for anyone for anyone with an ounce of energy or at least as much intelligence as average houseplant to earn his own keep. Given that was the most demonstrable accomplishment of the American male, no one was very impressed. Well, that's a bigger deal now than it used to be. And given the fundamental sector shift the economy is going through, it will likely be an ever bigger deal in the future.

Reihan recently wrote an interesting article about this, where he largely sees it the other way, going so far as to call the current economic crisis a "he-cession." I would be more sympathetic to his thesis if the future of economic growth was a simple battle of brains vs. brawn. But I don't think it is. In fact I think we crossed that particular bridge a long time ago. Instead, we need energetic perseverant visionary leadership toward creating things (and careers) that don't exist yet, the foundation of a new economy we don't understand all that well. And as much as I love the girls, that's not who I'll be putting my money on to do it. And from what I've seen of the dissident conservatives so far, I'm not betting on them either.

Finally, let's give best wishes to our friend Boethius on the occasion of the anniversary of American Independence, a foremost accomplishment of visionary perseverant males. It's one of his favorite days of the year, being the patriotic Roman-American that he is.

Take This Job and Shove It

The political world is buzzing over the resignation of Sarah Palin as governor of Alaska. I personally am not. Various pundits are suggesting that her national political career is over. That's probably so, but so what? Unlike most of the political establishment, she had a real life before she entered politics, and will have a real life to return to when her political aspirations are over. It's hard for me to see offhand what she gets in compensation that's worth enduring the cheapshots from David Letterman or Andrew Sullivan. To some extent we were lucky to have her for as long as we did.

Let's recall, the essential point of Palin's candidacy was bandwidth. That is, the Republican party is not defined by George W Bush, Congressional sex scandals, George Ryan, No Child Left Behind, or whatever else is left at its feet, fairly or otherwise. As Obama blunders and time passes this will less of an issue, and less justification to support Sarah Palin relative to Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, or whoever.

Things of Sense

Poulos' criticism of the phrase 'a sense of' lacks full context for me, so I will have to work with the (few) examples he provides. Furthermore, wandering off as he does into a digression on his dissertation and other thoughts, might give the sense that he is right, but this does not convey objective rightness in and of itself.

"Give us a sense of what's going on out there in that hurricane, Bob." What is the difference between this formulation and the more traditional, "What are the conditions in the hurricane, Bob?" I suppose the former, offending statement is meant to invite the viewers to experience what a hurricane is like rather than quote wind speeds and rainfall rates that might otherwise convey little human meaning. So the question I would want to ask is, "What's wrong with making that experiential, sensate connection?" I don't see a problem with it myself. In fact, this seems to me a good example of a quite positive use for 'a sense of': we literally cannot experience the actual noun--the hurricane--ourselves. But for the sake of more immediate sympathy for those suffering from it, getting a 'sense' of it, having our senses engaged, is actually more of an 'incarnational' way of communicating the weather than the overly abstracted reporting of mere statistics.

The second example (and only other one I can find) is this:

"critics of contemporary life merely beg the question when they call for us to replace, say, our lost community with a new 'sense of community'. "

He may have a point here. I think this is a place where we tend to want to privilege our feelings over the objective experience of a thing. We probably don't have strong senses of real communities except at heightened moments, and ultimately I don't think that we seek out communities merely to get a sense of being a part of one. I don't often have a strong sense of being part of the Catholic Church in its full universality. When Pope John Paul II died, the beauty of the ceremonial for his funeral and the following conclave helped me to experience a stronger sense of communion with the universal Church. Even when I am not actively sensing this, however, the communion is still there. If one gets a sense of communion when there is not (as may be the case with 'cultural Catholics' who support abortion rights), this seems to me to be a good example of the disconnect betweent the objective thing and a sense of it.

Personally, I haven't noticed this explosion of poor usage. From what I imagine to be the common usage, I might actually support it. I am an advocate of a strongly Incarnational way of understanding this world; however, we must be discerning about what it is that we incarnate. Evil can just as easily incarnate itself as good, and so before we crown our own experience as unambiguously pointing to objective reality, we might exercise some restraint and merely admit that our experience is provisional: "I am getting a sense of your irritation about this phrase." Rather than, "You are angry about this phrase." This caution allows for our senses to be corrected by the objective reality.

I understand that there is impatience among conservatives with the lack of conviction that many postmoderns persons show toward the truth, but I think forbidding the use of this phrase will not help people arrive at truth. They will either find another way to express this reserve with regard to the truth, or will simply do what a lot of people do today and just assert their sense of things as true, whether or not this claim has any merit.

But it seems to me that even in the two examples he gives, the import of the phrase is slightly different, and this obviously badly vitiates his claim.

My Sense of Things

James Poulos is an eccentric sort of conservative. He contributes to and keeps good relations with The American Spectator, so he's not a lame too-cool-for-Hannity dissident of the sort we've been complaining about in this space. Nonetheless, sometimes it seems to be difficult for some of us dim bulbs to figure out his train of thought.

One of his recurring gripes is to complain about "a sense of" as an idiom in contemporary speech and writing. I think we can stipulate that it is simply meaningless linguistic filler much of the time, and at first glance this seems to be a case of usage hypersensitivity, like those people who know the correct meaning of "momentarily" and cringe slightly when hearing the word in its colloquial sense. But I think Poulos wants to go further than that somehow, as if there is something actually blameworthy or alienating in its common use.

I don't get it. Again allowing for overuse, "a sense of" can be used to emphasize something quite real, ie, the epistemological distance between our experience of the world and its underlying reality. We can (and often do) experience a sense of alienation with respect to some cultural phenomenon or another without actually being alienated from it in any meaningful way. It's hard, for me at least, to describe the difference without using the offending phrase.

I wouldn't bother with this ordinarily but now we have our very own philosophe on retainer here at FlyingSpit. I wonder if Boethius thinks there's any there there.

Aesthetics for Me, Taxes for Thee

Boethius inquires into the tension between the aethetics of conservatism and the capitalist, neoliberal economies we live in. He naturally touches on high art, because he's very interested in it. And because it is high art that is most directly a function of aesthetic judgment, that is where the rubber ought to meet the road.

But for the various dissident conservatives it's not, and that actually threw me for a loop for a while. Instead, the neo-Amish dissident conservatives are more interested in evaluating and (to the extent they can) guiding political-cultural affairs according to their aesthetic criteria. In short, they are usually motivated by the desire to repudiate the George W Bush Administration and the what they see as that part of America which supported him. This also has (for them) the benefit of asserting social superiority toward those they disdain. Ie, those Republican-voting yokels buy their food at Winn-Dixie (or God forbid McDonald's), but I buy my produce from a farmer's market every Sunday. Therefore I'm cooler than they are, hooray for me.

One problem with this is that they are inclined to overthrow capitalism in favor of some kind of communitarianism or distributism, ie, something they have hidden behind door #3 that has never existed before in a major industrial economy. Mainstream conservatives remember very well how hard it was to defeat Communism and socialism and are willing to live with the very real imperfections of capitalism for the sake of not having to win those battles again.

The other complaint that I have wrt dissident conservatism is that so much of it amounts to welfare for the intelligentsia. This is magnified of course by the fiscal priorities of the Obama Administration. We are at a time where the base of our economy is changing, toward things we don't understand and can't predict. Right now there is a profound call, IMO, for the right tail of the Bell Curve to assert leadership toward creating economically renumerative opportunities for the rest of the world to spend their time harvesting. Instead we have professors of this and environmental directors of that working to preserve their prerogatives.

What Aesthetics?

The tragic death of Michael Jackson seems as good an opportunity as any to reflect on the 'aesthetics of modern economies', as Koz put it in a recent email exchange which gave rise to my invitation to blog here. Michael, as talented as he undoubtedly was, owed his extreme popularity to the very capitalistic arrangement of the modern recording industry, which has proven itself less able to generate, say, a Mozart.

Koz observes that many on the cultural right get themselves in a jam because they support modern economic arrangement, but lament the poorer level of cultural quality that emerges from the patronage of the mass public as opposed to, say the Esterhazy's or King Ludwig, not to mention the Church. There are some on the right, namely the stricter libertarians and Objectivists, who are fine with the trade-off, but others in the current coalition, variously labelled as the neo-Amish, Cunchycons, paleocons, et al, experience 'aesthetic revulsion about the lifestyle and media of the mainstream Right', the 'Hannity-Palin axis'. This obviously is a larger field than what I would strictly call aesthetics, but there is a continuum here, so my point about royal patronage still relates. For example, Sean Hannity would have a harder time making a living getting his opinion listened to if he didn't have the very capitalistic Fox network and the mass following it generates in programming propping him up. Sarah Palin is more intelligent, I think, but all the same seems to have emerged less, in my opinion, because of her inspired pronouncements on policy, than because of her appeal with the cultural milieu of Fox broadcasting.

I'm of several minds in this, and hope that the opportunity to work on a conversation will clarify some points.

Would it be inaccurate to consider the Hannity-Palin axis to be allied with the neocons? In listing the groups in the conservative coalition (such as it is right now), it strikes me that those I usually consider neocons seem to exhibit quite little in the way of actual culture (with the notable exception of the Catholic variety, such as Weigel and the late Neuhaus, may he rest in peace). Let it be known that I harbor no great appreciation for the neocon ideas. It seems that part of the neocon difficulty is that they bring from the left ideas about 'human nature' in the abstract that don't translate well on the ground. The idea, for example, that Iraqis would naturally desire and embrace democracy is based in an ideology about the human person that is divorced from what we observe in actual cultures.

When I say that neocons lack culture, I don't mean that Cheney, the Kristols and Podheretz aren't well-read, don't enjoy fine wine, listen to Mahler or whatever; it just that their personas come off as tone deaf to the connection between culture and locality; they tend to view the globe as a monolithic thing, and where it isn't, it needs more sameness, as in American policy. Rod Dreher or Joe Sobran or Mark Shea will more often drop in references to things like food, music, literature (and not just to make facile military points in the fashion of VD Hanson), etc. I should add that I do not intend to write off the neocons, though I've been tempted to in recent years; their thought has so influenced thinking on the right that it makes no sense at this point to pretend that the right can make any headway without the neocons.

The other groups (excepting again the libertarians and Objectivists), are more closely connected with local traditions, or at least small-scale cultural phenomena, as the name 'neo-Amish' especially evokes. But certainly Paleos have always been extrememly suspicious about over-arching ideologies and reluctant to favor, say, federal policy over state and local policy.

I will break there for now, though my thoughts in the area are numerous. Back to you, Koz.

If this is the case, then it might be that

Hey Baby, What's Your Signal?

"Signaling" is relatively new, relatively obscure part of economics (hat tip to Bryan Caplan for this). The idea is, instead of some concrete objective some of our actions are done for the purpose of increasing our status in the perceptions of other people.

The literature on this typically deals with education as the canonical case. Ie, the utility of a Harvard doesn't necessarily depend on anybody learning anything there. Employers want to hire people who can get in to Harvard, applicants want to demonstrate they can get in, and they may want to associate with them too.

In the political world there's a couple of important things that are best understood in terms of signaling. First the bad news: the GOP has been bleeding highly-educated, wealthier coastal voters for two decades. Normally this shows up in public opinion surveys as referenda on social or environmental issues. They believe in gay marriage, the Republicans don't. They believe in global warming, the Republicans don't. But these are mostly signals. Most of the time, these issues don't affect those who claim to care about them. But, caring about them is an important signal of higher social status those who care about monster truck rallies. Suffice to say, it's not good for the GOP that there's a significant number of voters whose primary political motivation is to disassociate themselves from your political base.

On the other hand, the Republicans can also use signaling to their benefit. Most of the time the political actors try to promise various benefits to the voters, with the hope of getting political support in return. This is a difficult game for the GOP at the moment, among other reasons because they are so far out of power that they can't deliver on whatever they promise. But, their is a substantial tradition in America that people who want to earn their own living and mind their own business vote Republican. So, let's point that out and make it a signal. Joe Candidate (R, Podunk) can say "Hey, I don't know what can be accomplished if I am elected. Among other things, that will depend on how many of us there are. But, I want America to be a place where we get rewards for success instead of bailouts for failure. If that's what you want, vote for me."

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt III

Between democracy, immigration and big government, you can choose any two. You can't have all three. - Eddy Elfenbein

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt II

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for this one, not that it's any big secret by now. And let's also note that the money spigot still hasn't been turned off. Nobody's writing any new subprime loans, but public-sector pensions, entitlements, and various other forms of pork-barrelling are still going strong.