And on the 29th day, GingerMan rested

Yeah, no leap year this time around! So, this post (my 29th of the month) is just gravy.

But, pretty cute still...

Secular Right vs. Jim Kalb

The blog Secular Right has the following mission statement:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

In a serve-and-volley mildly reminiscent of two recent GingerMan posts here and here, Jim Kalb takes his sword to the air-quotes of Human Flourishing in the above:

My own view, which my book goes into at length, is that by itself rational empiricism gives you desire and technique as (radically anti-conservative) guides to life. Satisfaction of desire doesn’t seem to constitute human flourishing. To get beyond it though you need a moral tradition that’s understood to connect to something that transcends desire and thus the empirical.

So far as I can tell, an adequate theory of such a thing is going to have to explain why life objectively has a purpose, and that’s going to involve attribution of purpose and intention to the world at large. In other words, the theory is going to be religious. And it’s going to say something definite, otherwise it will be useless. So it’s going to make specific religious and non-empirical (”supernatural”) claims. [em: original]

Razib Khan, a.k.a. "David Hume," responds here:

As for the idea that a transcendent reality is necessary, I will venture to offer that I have always found the models and theories posited by religious people about their gods less than awe inspiring. There certainly beauty and glory in this universe which is simply outside the purview of human animal comprehension; anyone who has grappled with the formalisms of Quantum Mechanics can claim that they seen the face of the incomprehensible & awesome abyss.

But I believe that its relation to a human political and social order are tenuous at best. Rather, the primary entity which transcends is the community and society, because I do believe a strong case can be made that individualistic hedonism which is the final form of classical liberalism offers diminishing returns precisely because of the nature of the human beast. We are a social animal, and individual happiness is contingent upon communal amity.

Note: These sorts of philosophical discussions are of course only relevant for a very small, if influential, minority. Most human animals operate in a world of custom and innate reflex, not analytic reflection.

The final note resonates, I think, with my prior post re: Scandinavia. Which is to say that even lacking a seamless philosophical consistency, so long as a society is providing an ethical framework within which human flourishing remains possible, to the extent we can measure it (i.e. life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness), then I think we have to conclude that the society is *working* successfully at some fundamental level.

People do not consult their philosophy texts in the course of their daily existence, and even if they do, we seem to be able to live quite comfortably in states of severe cognitive dissonance on many such topics through effective rationalization of our own behavior such that it aligns with our "beliefs."

In a surprising turn of events, the blog response by Khan has failed to change Jim Kalb's entire metaphysical view of the universe:

The authors at Secular Right apparently believe that their choice of godless conservatism is justified, and that they're avoiding errors made by John Rawls, radical Islamists, and Sarah Palin. For them to say their beliefs reflect their natural human desire to survive and stay on good terms with their fellows may be true, but it doesn't explain their grounds for saying they're right and others are wrong. The beliefs of those other people reflect such things as well. Also, it seems that whichever groups, arguments and goals actually win best represent the natural tendencies of man and the world. Is actual success then the standard for rationality, justification, the summum bonum and all the rest of it?

In fact, of course, the Secular Right slogan is "Reality & Reason" and not "Hail Victory." It doesn't do though for them to claim their views are better because in addition to following natural human tendencies they are in accord with reality and reason. Is the claim of truth and rational superiority just an expression of inborn drives and social conditioning, or does it have to do with reality and reason in a sense that transcends naturalistic behavioral explanations and makes their views truly the more worthy choice?

Whole lotta smiting going on

Rod Dreher, in a post that responds to Andrew Sullivan, makes a statement that I am still having trouble getting my mind around:

Andrew brings up an important point, one that serves to highlight a critical difference between the two basic strains of American conservatism -- libertarian, and traditionalist.

Libertarianism is anti-statist liberalism. It is also the dominant school of American conservatism.

[snip]


For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself.

Traditionalism is a harder sell, obviously, as any philosophy that imposes limits on human choice and liberty will be in America. Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.

If it's a matter of agreeing with Andrew that the Sixties (which is to say, the social revolution that broke open in the Sixties, but which has been ongoing since then) made possible a greater increase in personal satisfaction, and even legitimate happiness, then I do agree with him.

Certainly there can be no greater example of the gains made in virtue via the repudiation of immoral and unjust legal barriers to full black citizenship. Similarly, women are treated more fairly now, and though some of you will doubt me, I agree that the world is a better place for gay folks than it once was. It would be foolish to view the Sixties as nothing but darkness, in the same way that it's hard to deny that many good things came out of the Enlightenment.

The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad.

I answer in the negative. [em: mine]

In the above, Dreher recognizes broadly (and embraces) the benefit of the Sixties for blacks, women and gays (i.e. that is to say approx. 60+% of the US population), but concludes that on balance the total impact was negative.

Now, it would be unfair to Rod (having read him regularly) to say that this indicates that he would willingly trade those gains to restore the benefits he sees as lost. It would more likely be that he would have preferred to find a manner to achieve most of the same benefits without the associated costs that he finds objectionable. But still, even when taken at that charitable level, this is an absolutely fantastical statement from my point of view. The losses have outweighed the gains?!?!

He doesn't elucidate what exactly he judges these losses to be, but from my reading of him over time, I would conclude that they typically fall into 3 categories:

1) Decline in religiosity - resulting in unspecified, but extremely perilous, moral decay with a nihilistic emphasis on personal fulfillment
2) Family breakdown / divorce - resulting in more single-parent homes and social problems emanating from same
3) Sexual freedom / abortion - related to item #2 and the decline in traditional marriage

Now, if I were Rod, and I saw the total volume of abortions performed since Roe vs. Wade as effectively a national holocaust, then maybe this would make some sense. After all, one cannot compare the increase in freedom for many individuals to the actual loss of innocent lives for others and judge the tradeoff as worthwhile.

But, I don't get any sense that the abortion question is the singular fulcrum upon which this determination pivots. In other words, I doubt he would answer the question alternately even if Roe v. Wade had never come to pass, but all other societal changes remained the same.

So, what to make of this? When I read traditionalists such as Dreher, there is an almost unremitting sense of impending doom in their writing (he actually has a blog post category tag called "decline and fall"). But, it is never entirely clear from whence the final cataclysm is going to erupt. However, what we do absolutely know, for sure and with certainty, is that there is a Judgement Day on the very near horizon where the world gets its collective comeuppance for having strayed from the path.

Then there's this from the New York Times:

Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn’t easy.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

Well documented though they may be, these two sets of facts run up against the assumption of many Americans that a society where religion is minimal would be, in Mr. Zuckerman’s words, “rampant with immorality, full of evil and teeming with depravity.”

Which is why he insists at some length that what he and his wife and children experienced was quite the opposite: “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”

[snip]


At one point, he queries Jens, a 68-year-old nonbeliever, about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture. Jens replies: “We are Lutherans in our souls — I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah. It’s an old, good, moral thought.”

To be clear, I myself am not anti-religious. For the most part, I was raised outside of a religious context, and so I don't really feel particularly strongly one way or the other about it. When pressed about the nature of the Almighty on one occassion, I replied, "What can I tell you? I don't have well-formed opinions on the matter."

Religious belief and community obviously has great meaning for an enormous number of people and for that I am thankful on their behalf. However, what I can never fully appreciate is the absolute certainty with which some (especially conservative religionists) claim that an unreligious environment leads, without possible exception, to complete and utter societal breakdown and chaos.

Which is just to say that it seems that there is demonstrable evidence that there are still ethics even without specific doctrinal religious belief. Even people who are full blown atheists do not intentionally raise their children to be sociopaths.

In other words, what exactly is the problem with Scandinavia? And, why isn't there more smiting in progress there anyway?

Quote of the Day: "Hey Howard, there's your Chinaman."

On a related note, NPR's All Things Considered reviews the cultural legacy of The Donger:

"Every single Asian dude who went to high school or junior high during the era of John Hughes movies was called 'Donger,'" says Martin Wong.

Wong and Eric Nakamura co-founded the magazine Giant Robot, which covers Asian and Asian-American pop culture.

"If you're being called Long Duk Dong," Wong explains, "you're comic relief amongst a sea of people unlike you."

Worse, says Nakamura: "You're being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who's out of control. It's like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character."

Nakamura and Wong say that before "The Donger" came along, they got called "Bruce Lee" at school. That wasn't so bad: At least Lee, the martial-arts star, could kick ass. Sixteen Candles stole even that limited pleasure — and Asian-American guys focused their frustration on the actor who played Long Duk Dong. After all, he was one of them: born in the U.S.A.

Can I speak to Little Miss Muffet in Accounts Receivable?

Alice posted this link previously to her FB page, but to any who missed it at the time, this one had me ROFL as they say: Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing.

The part where he asks her if she is sure this is the same drawing just slays me.

[Blogger meta-note: Maybe this post seems a bit like filler (since it was previously linked to as I note above), but I am on a 1 -post-a-day pace for February, and so on the final kick down the homestretch, if I can't think of anything smart to say, you will just have to live with rehashed arachnid comedy.]

They don't call it the dismal science for nothing

Robert Shiller, Yale economist, who predicted the housing bubble attempts to look into his crystal ball in this interview with analyst Henry Blodget.

Shiller: It's the biggest [housing bubble] in world history. We are entering a new era.

[snip]

Blodget: Just to clarify that, because I think that's probably shocking to a lot of people, you're saying that we're [only] halfway back down to effectively fair level.

Here's Shiller's quantitative analysis of long-term housing values (inflation-adjusted) from which he bases the above estimate.




What many people don't often realize is that housing per se isn't actually historically a great investment in terms of value appreciation. People tend to underestimate the cost of the home improvements that they make along the way and of course inflation boosts the nominal perceived value upon resale.

But, home ownership mostly creates a backdoor savings plan via the payments made on the mortgage principle, and thus has served as an important vehicle for middle class wealth accumulation as a side effect of the slow increase in equity over time. That was, of course, when people were actively looking forward to paying off their mortgages (i.e. neighbors used to hold "mortgage burning parties" once they had paid in full) instead of pulling out the increased paper equity value via home equity loans and lines of credit.

Now, obviously, housing is a highly locale-specific product. So, even if Shiller is correct in aggregate, there will be some areas that are not as bad, but that also means there will be others that will be even worse.

Via Bloomberg:

It has taken Susan Erb just three years to see the value of her Merced, California, home plunge by more than half to $350,000. Next month, her mortgage payment jumps 20 percent to $3,321 and she knows she can’t afford it. Her bank won’t rework the loan unless she stops paying altogether.

[snip]

Merced, the epicenter of the U.S. foreclosure crisis, demonstrates the steep challenges President Barack Obama will face in trying to stem defaults. One in 59 housing units in the Merced metropolitan area received a foreclosure filing in January, the highest rate in the U.S., according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of default data. For- sale signs are everywhere and a building boom fueled by subprime mortgages has been brought to a standstill. Just 16 construction permits were issued last year. In 2005, there were 1,427.

“We’re ground zero,” said Merced Mayor Ellie Wooten, 75. The city, population 81,000, had an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent in December, “and it’s going to get worse,” she said.

One of the key metrics that is always useful to look at is rent comparison. At a basic microeconomic level the "value" of the house has to be correlated to the monetary stream of payments that someone is willing to pay to live in it (or similar accomodations). So, if house rents in the area are far below the average mortgage payments, there is an economic incentive to rent rather than buy. And, this economic reality will continue to place downward pressure on prices until they come into balance.

Rents (and therefore housing prices) get bid up either when a) the area population increases or b) the average wealth of the citizens increase, since both place upward pressure on prices.

By contrast, in a separate article I have read that there are welfare recipients living in some of the above-noted Merced McMansions because the rental market there has fallen so fast with so much foreclosed housing on the market. And, anybody that owns a home there, even if they weren't personally irresponsible, is going to get hurt badly by all this.

Hey brother, can you spare a balance transfer?

Megan McArdle on how the financial crisis is changing the state-of-play in the credit card industry:

It used to be that credit-card companies lured customers with cash rewards. Now American Express Co. is paying to get rid of them. The card issuer is offering selected customers a $300 AmEx prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts.

The unusual move underscores how quickly conditions have deteriorated in the credit-card market. The current economic morass was provoked by spiking mortgage defaults. But as the economic crisis widens and unemployment climbs, there is growing concern that credit-card defaults will soar into the stratosphere as well.

"This is a huge paradigm shift," says Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com, a credit-card review Web site. He says he expects other large companies to follow suit with offers to entice consumers to pay off their balances, as card issuers cope with increasing defaults.

[snip]

I'm hearing a lot of discussion among friends and on finance shows about a new dilemma cash-strapped consumers are facing: pay down credit card debt, or save cash? The answer used to be a slam dunk: with interest rates at 20%, you pay off the cards, and run them up again if you hit some desperate emergency.

But with credit lines being slashed, that's no longer a safe bet; you could pay off your cards, get laid off, and find yourself with no safety net. Then again, if you don't pay off the cards, you're more likely to get your credit line cut.

No one I've talked to has a clear answer other than: cut your spending to the bone and put half what you save thereby into a bank account, the other half into paying down your cards. Which is why all the restaurants in DC seem unusually spacious these days--when I walk by them. Even with no crushing credit card debt, we, too, are eating at home.

The volume of credit card offers filling my mail box has declined markedly and we have been having similar family budget conversations in my home, which is to say that we have never really known any severe financial adversity in our lives in large part due to the easy availability of cheap credit. When Alice & I were both in school, we could simply charge things we needed but didn't have the money to pay for right then. Further, we could get much of it at 0% interest through utilizing revolving balance transfer offers, so there wasn't even a financial penalty for making such a choice.

Thus, we have no charming stories, like my own parents, of eating popcorn for an entire week while awaiting your first paycheck from a new job. However, I'm pretty sure that kind of experience only tends to be considered *charming* when viewed through the long lens of past memory. At the time, I doubt charming was the first word that came to mind.

Muffin Tops of the World, Unite and Take Over

Apropos of nothing, this advertisement headline just struck me as very amusing. Not quite the landing at Normandy, but can I buy war bonds to support this anyway?

I mean, I'm like kind of a big deal in Berlin

Fellow blogger Chris Daley, of escapegrace fame, advised me of a tool that you can add to your blog which tracks the IP address of site visitors. One of the nifty reporting features of the tool is a map of the world showing the various locations my innumerable readers.

As you will note below, I am now spreading the globe like wildfire (or at least a pesky social disease), even to far off Berlin. If I were David Hasselhoff, I'd be feeling a bit nervous at this point.

On the list of things you don't see everyday

I often spend part of my workday in coffee houses that have wireless connections. It is just too isolating to spend all day working in my home by myself.

There is a man who comes into my favorite haunt, Milkboy Coffee, from time to time. He is either a performance artist or is not quite fully mentally balanced because he typically acts in a manner that can be safely described as "not normal" by my suburban bourgeois standards of public behavior.

Today, for example, he arrived (singing) wearing a toy indian headdress and carrying a stuffed rooster in one hand and a giant silver star in the other. I am not sure if this signifies anything, but I'll be avoiding poultry for dinner this evening just to be on the safe side.

Quote of the Day: "Is Pat there? Just tell him it's me."

via videosift.com

Can we get Pat Sajak as Commerce Secretary?

Megan McArdle has some new ideas to deal with the banking crisis:

For the next round, I'm proposing a new instrument to be known as the "Squibble", which will have an unknown and unknowable face value based on a secret random numbers table, a payout schedule to be determined by spinning a big wheel installed in the company's headquarter lobby for that purpose, and a structure to be arbitrated under the financial laws of a country picked at random every quarter.

This will prevent anyone from definitely stating that the banks are undercapitalized. It will also provide financial journalists with some much-needed entertainment.

Quote of the Day: "I don't immediately think, 'There's another one snuffed it in the night.'"

Jim Kalb replies...

Who knew? I thought this was a closed conversation just between me and the other voices in my head :)

In any case, Jim Kalb has responded (graciously) to my post re: his talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism.

[Gingerman concludes] that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I don't think that's quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they're different but they can't get on without each other. You won't be able to make use of reason unless you take a lot on faith, while a belief that you can't understand in an orderly way isn't much of a belief.

[snip]

And then there's the old subjectivism issue: things and actions can be objectively good or bad, and that's not observable or measurable. If they couldn't then "irrational," which is an evaluative term, would be an empty term of abuse.

[snip]

As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him. The world must be reasonable for us to know it rationally, and it must have an intrinsic connection to purpose for some purposes to be intrinsically good and others bad. How do we talk about such features of the world without religious categories?

Now, in my defense, I don't think I was quite so black-and-white on the point of declaring that Kalb sides with Faith and against Reason, as from my original post here:

[Kalb] doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

There is some sloppy slippage of the term "reason" in my words above. And, it is no doubt true that when excerpting someone's words it is difficult to do so without doing some damage to the meaning when re-contextualizing it. But, given that Mr. Kalb has an entire book on the subject, I'm sure his arguments will hold up admirably :)

In any event, to re-visit my original post, the reason (if I may be so bold to use the word here) that I found Kalb's argument intriguing was on 2 points:

1) Kalb rejects (or at least deems as insufficient) the common conservative Burkean logic that traditions should be given the benefit of the doubt, since we humans have little capacity to foresee unpredicted consequences of sweeping social changes. From Kalb:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

It was in the sense that Kalb sees the necessity of changing the terms of the debate (or at least pushing open their boundaries) in a manner I hadn't encountered before that intrigued me. I read him as arguing that there needs to be more of an affirmative stance in favor of holding certain traditions, and that it is insufficient (in practical terms) to rely solely on a "first do no harm" dictate of Burkean vintage in order to hold the line.

My own belief, however, is that modern political philosophy per se is not the principle driver of the "unsettling" which upends Burkean defenses of tradition, but rather economic dynamism. This is one of the internal fissures of the US Republican variant of conservatism, which is that the GOP melds the open-borders, free-trade interests of economic conservatives with the traditional social interests of cultural conservatives. And, in the long run, there is an inherent conflict with the two.

Now, obviously, there is a feedback loop between economics and culture. We fashion the tools that fashion ourselves, to paraphrase McLuhan. But, economic change tills the soil from which social and political change grows.

As an example, I went to visit my in-laws for X-mas holidays in Washington DC one year. As part of the trip, we went to a museum on the Washington Mall which, at the time, was featuring a retrospective on American life of 100 years ago. Wooden wheelbarrows, hand-wrapped straw brooms, obscure farm implements, and positively terrifying medical instruments abounded.

All of these items were in common usage at the time of the birth of my grandmother (who lived to 92). She was born into an agrarian society, lived through an industrial one, and died only recently, as we enter a new age that still seems to be finding its legs (i.e. information, bio-genetic, other...??).

The economic ground underneath modern life changes with such rapidity that it implicitly casts the wisdom of the ages into doubt. In pre-modern societies, the elders literally were the repositories of the Truth, accumulated in their own life experiences, as to how one should live successfully (read: they knew how to stay alive). And, the evident practical value of this wisdom gave them and the traditions of the society they governed a moral authority.

For example, here's Dreher quoting Patrick Deneen:

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture.

Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Now, surely the utilitarian argument alone for tradition only carries so much weight, but still, when 8-year-olds are teaching their own grandparents how to program the VCR, the natural deference to elders, and their traditions more broadly, inevitably gets more critical interrogation.

Additionally, economic progress itself allows for the "leisure activity" of exploring non-traditional social arrangements and mores. It is only a very rich society that can afford the 1960's in the sense of being able to finance the freedom of many young people to hang out in college, smoke weed, and burn their draft cards and/or bras on alternate weekends. A few generations earlier, they all would have been farming and hoping for a harvest of sufficient size to live through the coming winter.

I haven't read enough of Kalb's work to comment, but it is a common conservative trope to blame all the ills of modern social life on the liberal cultural elite. By my lights, traditionalism has far more to fear from its bankers than its college professors.

2) More interestingly, though, is the defense of *irrational* traditionalism, which is to say that Kalb seeks a reasoned way of defending traditional loyalties and cultural norms against claims of irrationality that otherwise render such conservative sensibilities illegitimate within the current forms of accepted public discourse.

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

In other words, only by arguing forward, via reason, from objective first principles (i.e. God) can one reach defensible conclusions for such traditions. Thus, Kalb claims the future of conservatism will require faith to effectively justify itself.

The reason this claim interests me is due to the concept of what constitutes *irrational* belief. This is to say that there is much that I may hold dear, my moral sense if you will, that I cannot justify in any purely rational sense. However, I also cannot justify it via reference to an omniscient God that establishes universal objective standards. Thus, taken from this standpoint, which belief system is actually *irrational* here?

Quite obviously, Kalb has spent much more time thinking on these points than I have. And, it probably goes without saying that I am not going to convert to Catholicism (Kalb's faith) any time real soon. But, Kalb's intellectual claim, if you will, deserves to be addressed.

Kalb extends his thoughts to his initial response here:

The identification of reason with a scientism that rejects tradition, faith and the ability to recognize what things are--which involves belief in essential natures--as irrational, and therefore oppressive. As I note in the last entry, the result is that reason can no longer deal with the most basic and obvious features of our situation. When meaning becomes personal choice or assertion, and social thought is no longer able to deal with marriage and family, you know you've got a problem with how people are thinking about things.

But of course, don't take my word for it, read it all :)

Quote of the Day: "People try to make me sound a lot weird."

Link bait for Alice. Indulge yourself, my dear.

My sense, though I may find out this assumption is unwarranted, is that most GingerMan readers do not click through to read the full-length articles that I may excerpt within my own blog. Thus, I often have a tendency to excerpt larger sub-sections of external posts in order to ensure that the full import of the author's meaning is clear.

However, I am pretty sure that the following article in the New York Times is going to prove irresistable to my dear wife:

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

[snip]

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

Billy Gillispie, total a**hat? We report, you decide

Watching the Florida-Kentucky b-ball game this eve (after Villanova kicked Marquette to the curb, yeah!). ESPN has this thing the sideline reporters do all the time now, which is stop one coach for a quickie interview on the way into the locker room and the other on the way back out to start the second half.

They always ask 2 questions and the coaches know in advance that this is coming. It isn't something that the sideline reporter just dreamed up with on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Thus, it is somewhat hard to explain the following behavior by UK coach Billy Gillispie, other than to characterize it as the actions of a total a**hat.

The halftime buzzer sounds (score is tied, so it is not apparent that Gillispie would have been in an unusually foul mood owing to the game situation) and the teams flood off the floor. The camera cuts to the sideline reporter who starts in with her first question. She leads into the question by providing a little framing context to the game, with Gillispie looking straight at her the whole time.

She finally finishes up with the question and turns the microphone to Gillespie: "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear your question."

Yeah, right. So, I just stood here for 25-30 seconds watching your mouth move but giving no physical or verbal indication that I couldn't hear you, so that when you were done, I could make you repeat yourself in full.

Reporter leans into Gillispie and offers the first question again. He gives typical coach-speak non-answer answer.

Reporter follows up with question number 2: "One of your priorities was disrupting the vision of Nick Calethes (Florida point guard). How do you think you've done in that regard so far?"

Gillespie: "Well, you seem to know a lot more about this that I do. Some of these things I've never heard of before. Blah. Blah. Blah...."

Yeah, preventing a clear line of sight for the other team's primary ball handler is practically an unknown concept in the field of basketball. Stupid sideline reporter, must have thought she was watching a soccer game. Can't understand why they let women cover sports in the first place.

Look, I'm sure every coach hates this crap. But, answering banal press questions comes with the gig and there is no reason to show up the lowly sideline reporter who is simply trying to do her job.

You make millions of dollars a year and coach one of the premier teams in college basketball, Mr. Gillispie, so answering her questions is part of your J-O-B. Try showing a little respect next time instead of being a total a**hat.

(Note: The last time I saw Kentucky play a few weeks back, he did the exact same thing, which is show up the sideline reporter unnecessarily. I guess the only thing worse than consistent a**hattery would be the unpredictable variant.)

Who Let the Dogma Out?

This post is subject to my prior disclaimer about conservative/liberal terminology, which is to say that it speaks more to the divide from a political philosophy standpoint than a partisan Red/Blue one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's Rick Warren in a published Newsweek debate with well-publicized atheist Sam Harris:

WARREN:

I believe [The Bible] is inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas.

[snip]

I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it.

This seems to me as a fairly banal set of statements in the broader context of our modern political and cultural life. The intellectual move is to posit that reason tells us things that we can know and observe about the physical workings of our world, but that everything beyond this (morality, spirituality and other issues of a transcendent nature) is the purview of faith since truth claims in this domain cannot be readily determined via scientific inquiry.

Essentially, Warren depicts reason and faith are two different models of epistemology, but ones that are complementary rather than contradictory. Intellectually, it is a modern form of truce in the Scopes-monkey-trial wars for cultural supremacy.

However, in a very thought-provoking article from James Kalb (Reason and the Future of Conservatism), he clearly sees these two philosophical viewpoints as more naturally oppositional in nature.

He doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

He starts by defining the current playing field:

“Reason” is the way we come to reliable conclusions about what is real, what is admirable, and what we should do. That is to say, reason is the way in which we come to conclusions about the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Modern thought likes conclusions that are clear, demonstrable, and to-the-point. So it is drawn toward scientific materialism, which tells us that everything worth thinking about can be understood based on simple concepts and clear demonstrations, and which is closely bound to experience and action.

It’s hard to bring principles into public discussion that critically-minded participants are not willing to accept, so scientific materialism now functions as our public orthodoxy. [em: mine]

In other words, in today's "polite society" the only arguments that are allowed to matter are ones that you can demonstrate through applied reason.

How does this impact our current socio-political environment?

Contemporary liberalism is the political perspective that develops the ethical implications of scientific materialism. So, correspondingly, it tells us that the point of politics and morality, like the point of rational action generally, is to get what we want.

[snip]

Thus, the standard for morality and politics must be maximum and equal preference satisfaction. Give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible.

[snip]

Such reasoning has three important consequences for contemporary liberal politics.

First, experts and markets rule. They give clear and rational answers, through clear and rational procedures. In concept, expertise should trump markets, because it is more clearly rational, but in practice it is a bit of each and the balance shifts.

Second, nothing is sacred, except the ego and its desires. If the goal is getting what we want, then everything is a resource to be used to maximize satisfactions. Physical objects, social arrangements, moral understandings, even human nature and the human body have no essence that must be respected.

Third, informal, nonrationalized arrangements like historical community, particular culture, and the family, that mostly run themselves in their own way and cannot be supervised by neutral experts, cannot be allowed to affect social life.

They’re irrational and at odds with the system of universal equal freedom to which liberalism aspires.

And, so where does this leave us?

The short answer is that it doesn’t work in the long run. You can’t formalize things to that degree.

Human life runs mostly by implicit knowledge (otherwise known as habit and prejudice). Similarly, social organization depends on informal ties that are irrational from the modern point of view.

If loyalty is treated as a personal taste, or as a means to an end, which is what now counts as rational motivation, it’s not loyalty anymore. Political modernity takes time to transform inherited ways, but as the process approaches completion society becomes less and less functional.

[snip]

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

What conservatism needs, then, is a non-modern understanding of reason—of what makes sense. Otherwise conservatives will always be playing defense, with no clear idea what the game is about.

In other words, attempts to defend conservative cultural traditions (gay marriage anyone?) cannot succeed if one confines oneself to merely arguing on a pure coldly rational basis, since the tradition itself did not come into existence on purely rational terms. It is a sort of category error in a sense.

But, it was his final move that struck me as interesting and possibly provocative:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

We need a more definite reference point. So where do we get a reference point that’s sufficiently independent of the status quo and enables us to orient our actions toward transcendent goods, truths and essences that we can’t completely grasp?

Religion is the obvious source. You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely. The acceptance of such a scheme is called faith. The future of any conservatism worth bothering about must therefore have something to do with religion.

In essence, can one argue for the value of something that cannot be reduced to a quantitative cost/benefit trade-off without resorting to the God trump card? Kalb says no, or at least not successfully in our current cultural context.

Not being a philosophy student myself, I am not necessarily armed to contest his claim. In other words, I believe myself to be an ethical person (or at least strive to be so), but I am also certain that I could not rationally defend a withering attack on the value of all of the moral and political sentiments that I hold solely through appeals to logic and science alone either.

Maybe I just choose to call my own dogma by a different name.

Quote of the Day: "The plumage don't enter into it, it's stone dead."

Of the 31 flavors of Conservative, Mint Choc Chip is my fav

Since I have been posting a bit about "conservatives" (and plan more in the near future), I considered that the use of term may confer some sloppy connotations at times and thereby potentially betray my actual intent, given that conservative and liberal are often used as stand-in labels for Republicans and Democrats.

But, there are many different variations of "conservative" philosophical thought (certainly Dreher and Sullivan both claim the mantle, but have very different prescriptions for what that should mean socially and politically). And, there are obvious fissures within the Republican Party itself about what being a conservative actually means and where it should place its policy priorities. [See the online kerfuffle (a blogger word if there ever was one) over Kathleen Parker's infamous Oogedy Boogedy op-ed article.]

Thus, in an effort to demonstrate that conservative does NOT definitionally equal Religious Right (or even free-market economics), here's a voter segmentation breakdown of the GOP from Tony Fabrizio's polling agency. I have seen him interviewed on C-SPAN and he seems a very fair and judicious sort, not a partisan cartoon.

[Note: percentiles below do not sum to 100%, but I am not sure if this is due to rounding or simply a small % of Repubs that could not be readily classified in one group or another.]

MORALISTS - 24%
- Laser-like focus on moral issues
- Identify as “strong” GOP and “very” conservative,-
- Only group where majorities are Born Again/Evangelical and go to church at least weekly

GOVT KNOWS BEST REPUBs - 13%
- Focused on social issues
- More likely to be life-long GOPers
- Strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems
- Skeptical of the Patriot Act, many would like to see less defense spending

DENNIS MILLER REPUBs - 14%
- Focused on social issues, esp. illegal immigration,
- Strongly oppose people gaming the system to get a “free lunch”
- They are more likely to be gun owners

FORTRESS AMERICA - 8%
- Focused on foreign policy and national security issues
- Concerned about the war, want to see an orderly end to war in Iraq
- Strong Isolationist streak runs through this group
- See government’s top job as protecting the homeland

BUSH HAWKS - 20%
- Focused on national security issues
- especially War on Terror
- want to see America using its might spreading democracy
- Support the war and are in it to win it, no timeline

HEARTLAND REPUBs - 8%
- Focused on bread & butter economic issues
- More pragmatic and less ideological
- Concerned with gas prices & economic growth
- Less frequent church goers – less focus on Moral issues

FREE MARKETEERS - 8%
- Focused on economic issues
- Skeptical of government action, they want tighter reigns on spending and lower taxes
- Less frequent church goers
- More libertarian -- counterbalance to “Moralists”

Fabrizio notes that in spite of these variations on focus, there are obviously a broad set of issues that (generally speaking) unite the GOP (otherwise they couldn't function as a coherent political party), whereas there are others that cause internal tension:

ISSUES THAT UNITE GOP
- Desire to balance the budget
– Belief that government spends too much
– Belief that taxes are too high
– Belief that federal government is too big and does too many things
– Belief that current immigrations laws should be followed and no special treatment
– War in Iraq was the right decision
– Belief that our Foreign Policy should be based on our own security and economic interests
– Support of employment non-discrimination for gays. **

** Even 60 percent of Moralists believe that private businesses should not have the right to discriminate against gay people.

ISSUES THAT DIVIDE GOP
- Top priority, cutting taxes or balancing budget?
– Whether health care coverage is a right
– Fund SS or allow private investment
– Level of military/defense spending
– Role of federal government in education
– Allowing gays to serve in the military
– Role of federal government on global warming
– Private initiative vs. government safety net
– Influence of religion on public policy
– Abortion **

** On abortion – only 28 percent want it totally banned

So, just for the record, many of my prior references to conservative inclinations were principally designating the Moralist / Gov't Knows Best components of the GOP and the modifications to public policy that they may seek to impose.

On the economic front, I am skeptical, like many a GOP Free-Marketeer, of the government's capacity to efficiently spend tax funds. A federalist approach (i.e. taxes raised locally for local needs) seems to be inherently more efficient than massive spending at the federal level.

But, I have been convinced that my money is safe (enough) with Democrats that I can vote against the heavy-hand of social intervention that some Moralists would seem to prefer the government engage in. In some senses, this makes me socially and economically liberal (in the classic economic use of the word "liberal," which of course today means conservative, only to further cloud the issue from a pure labeling standpoint).

The point, if there is one here, is that conservative, as a stand-alone word, doesn't effectively mean any one specific thing. And, as much as I may delight in the criticism of the lazy usage of language or sweeping generalizations by others, I should endeavour not to spare myself the lash if deserved, though one would hope any prior postings were still clear when taken in their own broader context.

It's my world, Andrew Sullivan is just living in it

I actually beat Sullivan to the punch on his Don't Divorce Us post which appeared today on his blog referencing the Courage Campaign's efforts in California to save the existing same-sex marriages in the state from being invalidated ex post facto by the court.

And, no cross-link by Sullivan back to the GingerMan?!? Where's the love for us straight, ginger white-boys, Andrew??

In fairness, the video was all over the web, so it wasn't like it was some scoop on my part, but it was odd to see it show up on Sullivan's blog after it appeared on my own, given that many of my posts are riffs on items he has posted first.

Please don't divorce my dads

Ken Starr returns (yes, *that* Ken Starr), much like a horror movie zombie who simply will not die, with a legal brief -- on behalf of the "Yes on 8" campaign -- that would forcibly divorce the 18,000 same-sex couples married in California last year before the passage of Prop 8.

California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 5, and will then make a decision within 90 days on the validity of Prop 8 and these 18,000 marriages.

Info above and the video link below are courtesy of Crooks and Liars, but don't watch without Kleenex nearby.

Quote of the Day: "Medical experiments for the lot of you..."

50 People, 1 Question

Courtesy of escapegrace, comes this short but brilliant video link. Somebody setup a camera on a street corner in Brooklyn and asked 50 random strangers the same, simple question: "Where would you like to wake up tomorrow?"

Like a lot of inspired art, the premise is austere, but the results are beautiful. I smiled the whole way through at the wonderful humanity of it. Quirky, funny, fantastical and sad. Just like life.

See what you think...


Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Randolph, my dearest

I was reading the SwampLand blog (Time magazine) the other day and noticed for the first time that one of their contributors named Jay Newton-Small is actually a woman. This reminded me of the fact that, as a young man, I often thought, at first blush, that women with seemingly masculine first names (e.g. Alex) had a special sex appeal. Maybe it just gave them an air of formidable confidence that was alluring.

However, efforts to convince my wife to change her first name to Randolph have thus far fallen flat. All things considered, this is probably for the best.

Quote of the Day: "May I take your trident, sir?"

Unbearable Cuteness Alert

Tiger cub plays in the snow.

The pre-historic GingerMan emerges

One of the blogs I read regularly is Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con. As an Orthodox Christian and social conservative, Dreher & I have little in common philosophically, but this is why I find it interesting to read him. I get some insight into a mind that works very differently from my own.

Shortly before I started this blog, I posted a reader comment to Dreher's blog. It was the first comment I had ever made there, or on any blog anywhere. But, a short time later, the GingerMan was born.

Thus, my blog comment on Dreher's site stands as a kind of proto-GingerMan climbing out of the primordial ooze of my thoughts and onto the dry land of the blogosphere, but still struggling to stand upright on its own (though I am not sure that Dreher would appreciate my choice of a Darwinian analogy here).

Here was Dreher's post in the midst of the initial unveiling of the credit crisis on Nov 20, 2008:

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger sees the economic crisis as fundamentally a crisis of faith and morals. [em: mine]

Excerpt:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions. [em: mine]

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Well, everybody said "Merry Christmas" back in 1929, and still. But I see his point.

Now, those who read Dreher regularly will readily see the appeal of this article to Rod's sensibilities. It refracts the economic crisis through a lens of moral degeneracy and reframes the narrative as one of retributive cosmic justice for our straying from the moral path we had formerly embraced. All that's missing is a few thunderbolts from the sky to bar-b-que Bernie Madoff in his shoes before he is imprisoned for massive financial fraud.

This struck me as utter bunk. And, it got my blood up. So, I posted the following comment (in part) as a reply:

This is just pathetic.

Let me tell you a fairy tale about the great Pastoral Fantasy of American past. Back then, people were nothing but wonderful, neighborly yeoman farmers. We were all Christian and lived by a strict moral code and an ethic of honor. Owing to this fact, there was no greed. It was just hand-shake agreements and square-dealing all-around. Then the Sixties came and the Garden of Eden was overrun with hippies and gays.

Ever hear of the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1600's?

[snip]

The reason the Greatest Generation may have been more “restrained” in their risk-taking appetite is not due to their superior sense of morality but because they had come through the searing experience of the Great Depression itself.

While you wave at this point in your comment at the bottom of the post, Rod, you are also way too quick to lay the blame for any societal ill at the feet of individual personal morality and lack of religious adherence. Otherwise, you wouldn't have posted this horses*** in the first place.

In a weird way, when I read such obvious self-congratulatory moralizing, I feel that I am more in touch with our collective "fallen nature" than conservatives such as Dreher. I don't think human nature has changed much over time, and the ethical failures of our current age (to the extent that this particular crisis itself even has a principally ethical root, which I dispute) are the same as they ever were. Whereas, Dreher and others long for some mythical Eden-like past where, owing to stricter religious observance across society, we escaped our capacity to sin and lived in a Latin Mass-centered moral paradise.

I don't believe such an ethical nirvana has ever existed (that's in Heaven, remember?). The critical moral issues that religions speak to were all present in the past and remain so today, irrespective of differences in formal modes of religious observance.

In short, being religious on the surface of one's life does not ensure an ethical core. You would think this would be a lesson someone such as Dreher would have internalized better than most. But, maybe it is one lesson that is only learned slowly and painfully.

As Dreher recently admitted:

Most Catholics, though, and most people in general, have a very difficult time seeing that their own side is capable of doing terrible things. Before the scandal, I was what you might call a political Catholic. Yes, I knew that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but in truth I believed that the real problem in the Church was the liberals. And I could give you a lengthy catalog of the bad they had done to and in the Church. Though I'm not a Catholic anymore, I don't think I was wrong about those things.

What I was wrong about, though, and very, very wrong indeed, was assuming that "our side" was therefore blameless. I really did think ideologically. Once, when I lived in Washington, someone brought up then-Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas for some reason. "Is he orthodox?" I asked. Yes, came the answer. And that settled it for me: Grahmann was one of the good guys. No more questions needed to be asked.

In fact, as I would find out once I got here, Grahmann was one of the bad guys in the Church. His public orthodoxy, while commendable, told us very little about the way he governed the Catholic Church in Dallas -- which, as it turned out, was terrible.

As I was beginning to report on the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I was warned by a reputable and deeply knowledgeable Catholic priest, a man who has been made to suffer for his orthodoxy, that I better not assume that just because a priest or layman claims to be orthodox, that they're trustworthy. Many villains hide beneath the cloak of orthodox Catholic piety, he told me. It's a feint they use to throw people off their scent. Trust me, he said, I've seen this a lot.

[snip]

What I found in actual experience is a mixed bag. I found liberal Catholic laymen and priests with whom I agree about little theologically, who were absolutely heroic in the scandal. I found conservatives with whom I agreed about most everything who were cowardly. What I found mostly, though, was that a man's true character could not be reliably discerned from his theological orientation. It was so much easier to be able to separate the sheep and the goats by ideology. But it's not real, and to give into that temptation is to set oneself up for humiliation, or worse, the perpetuation of evil. [em: mine]

[snip]

It's a temptation every one of us faces -- and if you don't think you face it, you are setting yourself up for a fall. I'm not saying there is no such thing as good and evil, right and wrong, or that all sides are always equally culpable in wrongdoing. What I'm saying is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: the line between good and evil runs right through the human heart. As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble.

"As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble." Now that's a place where Rod & I can agree in full voice.

Quote of the Day: "Every time I start talking about boxing..."