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 :)

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.

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.

Sullivan on Gay Marriage and Prop 8

To any that did not see it at the time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's response to Rod Dreher's post on this topic as one of the best defenses of gay marriage that I have come across:

Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

[snip]

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.

That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. [em: mine]

[snip]

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law.

The great thing about this post is that it gets beneath the surface legalisms at issue and exposes the heart of what is really under debate, which is the philosophical conflict between traditional conservatism and modernity itself. Gay marriage is simply the battle de jour upon which "deep statements about human nature" are being argued.

As Dreher himself writes even on the heels of the Prop 8 "victory" in California:

The concept of marriage has largely been severed from established norms in the popular understanding and is now seen as a contract formalizing the love a couple (for now) has for each other. Today, marriage has no intrinsic meaning that people are meant to serve; rather, it can be shaped to support people's desires.

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they're right. [em: mine]

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

And, this is the "loss" that conservatives such as Dreher are really inveighing against. It is not about marriage per se, but rather about the long, slow loss of unquestioned cultural authority that is now being realized via modifications to our formal systems of legal authority (e.g. divorce, abortion, gay marriage).

Notice Dreher's obvious lament of the "gradual emancipation of the individual will." Taken as a standalone statement, one might be tempted to label a "gradual emancipation of the individual will" as freedom, which within the secular ethos of the American polity is always categorized as an unmitigated "good."

But, within a philosophical framework of Original Sin and the inherent fallen nature of man, emancipation of the individual will, by definition, leads to evil. There can be no good outcomes for mankind or society without the constraints of religious doctrine to check our baser impulses. The apple beckons and we are futile to resist.

Or, as Wilkinson more succinctly noted in a discussion of Atheists vs. Pedophiles and which group was more despised by the American public:

Wilkinson (facetiously):

I mean it's kind of obvious. If God is dead, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, the first thing you want to do is abuse children.

Oddly, I think somehow that this moment provides an opening for religious conservatives to advocate more effectively for the positions they hold dear, since (in a modern context) they will be forced to justify and argue for the utility (moral or otherwise) of the positions they espouse. There is no unified cultural North Star doing all the heavy lifting of justification for them.

And, my sense is that those elements of religious faith that serve humanity (the Golden Rule, et al) will survive unscathed from the confrontation with modernity, while those that are merely relics of a different social order will simply fall over time, since the weight of cultural inertia alone is no longer enough to sustain them.

Our World is Upside Down

It strikes me that the principle difficulty facing traditional norms and values today is not liberal secular ideology (the right-wing radio boogeyman), but simply the rate of change in our world. When I was a child, I watched Captain Kirk say "Beam me up, Scotty" into his transponder. That was science fiction.

Today, I have an iPhone. Granted it doesn't do the full blown teleportation yet, but according to WikiPedia:

In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek will be invented within 100 years.

So, the difficulty in passing on traditions to the next generation is that, other than certain basic ethical propositions (don't kill, steal, lie, etc.), the world today's children are going to have to navigate is going to be significantly different from that of their parents and light years different than that of their grandparents.

See Dreher for an anecdotal example:

The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon - the gang hardly recognized me in a suit - leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken. Not a pitcher of whatever watery suds were on sale to the penurious undergraduates, whose wretched lot I shared only a few weeks earlier. Nope, I asked for an imported brand. And you know, for once I didn't have to worry about it.

That was 20 years ago. I don't know when I drank my last actual Heineken, but in a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, I've also never had to do without, not in any serious way. There has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. When I was a senior in high school, I tasted my first Heineken in, no kidding, Holland (cheap flights, a strong dollar - ah, 1984). When Daddy was a senior in high school, he installed the first indoor plumbing in his family's house.

Same planet, different worlds. [em: mine]

Economic dynamism loosens the relevancy of the past. The world changes, sometimes radically. In such circumstances, the wisdom and rituals of ones forefathers can seem less like the insight of the ages and more like old fuddy-duddyism that is simply out of touch with the times.

And, in such a chaotic environment, it is harder to implicitly teach the next generation simply "how to be," much less how to be successful or moral or wise. Not only are there not commonly agreed upon standards for what constitutes such behavior, but the very nature of society itself, and the demands it makes upon individuals, is constantly shifting.

And, gaping into such uncertainty can be daunting, decentering, and even disabling. A commenter on Dreher's blog captures the sense of cultural dislocation well:

(Caveat: I am Indian, so no scolding me about using the term "Indian"...that's what we call ourselves among ourselves).

Long ago, when Indian boys were very small, 5 or 6 maybe, their Dads made them a little set of bow and arrows. They used these to practice hunting. When they got a squirrel, or a rabbit, or even a little bird, they would take it solemnly to Mom. Their first kill was celebrated, no matter how small it was, and they were praised as hunters for anything they brought in to feed the family.

They were called "that MAN" when they did things like this, to build them up. And most importantly, ANYthing they brought in, the scrawniest little bird, a big deal was made about it, and right in front of everyone, the little morsel went right into the family cooking pot, alongside the deer or buffalo or anything else. It started that early, the work, the praise as men feeding the family. Yes, we men need that building up, from the earliest experiences. You would be surprised what proud words can do, or what the reverse can do to.

Now of course, little girls too were given miniatures of the tools they would use as women, would work alongside mom and grandma, learning to bead, to tan hides, making food, caring for the babies...this again from the age of 5 or 6. And they were also praised, and a big deal was made about the moccasins they made, and called "this WOMAN" even as a little girl when she did grownup work.

I contrast this with what I see when I see 18 year olds in this culture, doing horrible things, and people trying to keep them out of jail saying they didn't know any better, or they were so young. Doing terrible terrible things to each other. Unbelievable some of it. And all excused by parents, who want to be friends rather than parents.

If parents built up kids from the earliest age, 2 or 3, saying how proud they were when the kid did something good, was kind, picked up toys, made a big deal, that would be something. Not ignore them when everything is going ok, or act inconsistent. And when kids do bad, shame them, be disappointed, call them a "baby." Give them a rattle or a bottle. But then praise them again when they do good and call them a MAN or a WOMAN. That was how it was in the old traditional days among our Indian people. Back in the old days, sometimes kids even had to fight to protect their families, go to war, life and death.

I am really sad when I see the homeless kids. No one told them to be a MAN or a WOMAN was to help the family, be courteous to strangers, have self-respect. They think being a man or woman only means to have sex, to talk vulgar, drink, be violent, nasty, do drugs. That's not being a man or a woman. That is just being crazy (although now to many "crazy" means something good) and ugly. Teens want to be thought of as adults, it is a major thing. So how has it come to mean "adult" means sex and vulgarity, while taking care of yourself and others is "lame." Our world is upside down.

When the world is upside down, the old frameworks, standards, traditions no longer graft easily onto it. It becomes harder to always know where to turn, which direction to point ourselves, which way to guide our children. Many get lost.

And, according to Grant McCracken, it isn't likely to get any easier.

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exhuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them.

The LizardMan Cometh

I wrote recently about Grant McCracken's new book: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (see my overview of the thesis if need be).

In our postmodern world, individuals are taking more and more radical steps in personal transformation (not just through participation in sub-cultures, the rejection of social conventions, or the creation of new or modified public personas), even down to almost inconceivable changes of physical appearance, such as The LizardMan, Erik Sprague.

From McCracken:

Sprague has had more than 450 hours of tattooing to give his skin the appearance of scales. He had plastic surgery to install Teflon bumps in his forehead and to bifurcate his tongue. He has had his teeth filed to make them look like fangs.

On the heels of the successful mapping of the human genome, our collective future portends potential transformative capabilities beyond that which even the Erik Spragues of the world are presently tempted to dream. The nature of the some of the points of conflict is summarized below:

Another issue is whether scientists should seek to alter genetic structures to "improve" the human race. One of those who discovered the DNA structure, James Watson, is decidedly in favor of such action, the London Times reported April 24.

Watson, currently president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, said that spurious objections from left-wing and religious groups were slowing the pace of the medical advances that rely on genetics. "I think you should be able to do all you can to improve human life," he said.

Addressing a gala dinner at London Guildhall, Watson commented: "I don't see genetics as offending the gods, as I don't think there are any gods out there." The Times also noted that Watson recently opposed a ban on human reproductive cloning. [em: mine]

Others are pointing out the dangers of tampering with human genetic structures. In an April 14 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibbon, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," welcomed the celebrations of the anniversary of the DNA discovery.

But he warned that "the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous." Such schemes "look forward to a world of catalog children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots."

He added: "A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to leave it more or less alone."

Dr. Leon Kass is also wary of the trend toward genetic consumerism. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, addressed the issue in an essay in his recent book, "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics."

Genetic technology, he observed, "comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing."

But this same technology, he noted, "also represents something radically new and disquieting." We should reject the attempts by some scientists to cast the debate about genetic technology as "a battle of beneficial and knowledgeable cleverness against ignorant and superstitious anxiety." [em: mine]

Genetic manipulation, Kass explained, is decisively different from other medical technologies. First, changes to human genetic structures will be transmissible into succeeding generations. Second, genetic engineering may be able to create or improve human capacities and therefore new norms of fitness and health.

Moreover, genetic technology and the practices it will engender are not morally and humanly neutral, Kass warned. Scientists will end up judging other beings' worthiness to live or die based on genetic information. And the temptation to produce designer babies will bring about the commodification of nascent human life. [em: mine]

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the moral conundrums that are embedded therein. And, one doesn't have to be a religious conservative to wonder about our capacity to wield such power with wisdom and care.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

That is what Our Father said it was

UPDATE: I made slight modifications to the text to make my final point more clear.

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Just finished reading Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken.

Difficult read in places, but paints a picture of the development of the concept of self-hood and how an individual can/cannot change within a culture through different "transformations" (e.g. rites of passage, for example) which demarcate modifications in the nature of the self.

I will probably have multiple entries on the book (since there is much richness to draw on), but I'll try to summarize the thesis broadly below. He describes our culture as transitioning from:

1. Traditional - Face-to-face societies where ritual and myth are the means of transformation. Only prescribed types of transformations are allowed. Individuals may not choose or invent their transformational routines.
2. Status - Hierarchical societies where individual station is defined by birth (e.g. class or caste systems). Individuals could endeavor to change their status by cultivating exteriors (clothing, speech, deportment) and interiors (thought, emotion, outlook) to create a convincing performance of the social self.
3. Modern - Beat poets (previewing the 60s social upheaval) declared war on status transformation and adopted an oppositional cultural stance against the pretensions of bourgeois society. Authenticity and the individual self were valued above (and were in conflict with) mainstream social norms. Even within the mainstream, modern faith in technology and progress depicted an evolutionary self, one with the capacity for self-directed change, that was always forward looking and unmoored from its past.
4. Postmodern - The self is porous, fluid and open to near complete self-determination. The individual claims the right of self-authorship and the right to change the cultural categories that define him/her. Moreover, the individual consists of many "selves" with an emphasis on exploration of multiplicity over singular authenticity.

In short, the portrait moves from a sense of selfhood that is defined and limited by the outer societal norms, to one where the self is free to become nearly anything that one can imagine.

Now, the thesis is NOT that we shifted through all 4 phases, one displacing the one prior, but that they are additive. We still have "traditional" forms (e.g. weddings, etc.) but the power of society to define and control those meanings is limited and even contested (e.g. Prop 8).

I found this quote regarding traditional societies to be an echo of many present day culture war issues:

The ruling ideas of a traditional society are truly sovereign. They discourage criticism, originality and the "disposition to change." They discourage the very concept of reform. As J.S. La Fontaine puts it, these societies "base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors."

[snip]

What does not serve the "traditional forms" of a society is not allowed to matter. For many of these societies it isn't wisdom unless it is received.

When questioned as to why a particular ceremonial activity is carried out in a particular way, Navajo singers will most often say, "because the kiyin dine - the Holy People - did it that way in the first place." The ultima ratio of non-literates tends to be "that is what our fathers said it was." [em: mine]

The quote above reminded me of this recent Dreher post on the schism within the Anglican church.

Damon is troubled, and understandably so, by the fact that American churches are breaking apart based on positions congregations and individuals within them hold on culture-war issues. I don't see how any serious believer, whichever side he takes, can be cheered by schism. But I am inclined to think of schism as the second-worst option, if the only other is to accommodate one's church to a serious heresy.

As Damon notes, the stance a believer takes on issues like abortion, homosexuality, order and authority in the family, and a related constellation of concerns, typically places one within one camp or the other. It's no accident that there's a thread connecting stances on both sides; i.e., there's a reason why Christians who oppose abortion rights are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa. It all comes down, in the end, to Authority. [em: original]

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

To Dreher, a social conservative, the ultima ratio on any such question comes down to: that is what Our Father said it was.

In Praise of Vulgarity

This is far and away one of the most interesting things I have read on the web in a long time. “In Praise of Vulgarity” is a defense of popular consumerist culture and art.

The essential argument is that participating in culture is a form of self-experimentation and self-fashioning that is inherently anti-authoritarian and essentially human. The degrees to which people will go to seek out these modes of expression even in brutal, repressive political circumstances are truly amazing.

It’s over 9000 words long, so there is no way to effectively summarize it. But, I promise if you read it, you won’t be disappointed:

Capitalism's critics in the West blame what they call "the culture industry," which makes itself rich by aggressively manipulating consumerist idiots. The latter part with their money because they have been persuaded that some truly useless but expensive object will make them hip, youthful, or desirable, or raise their status. This manipulative scheme is now a global enterprise, filling the world with what Benjamin Barber and his ilk castigate as "junk." Worse, say the Daniel Bells and Hillary Clintons, it's a threat to Western prosperity, because it instills self-absorption at the expense of the work ethic.

This critique completely misses the point of cultural commerce. The citizens of the post-subsistence world have a historically remarkable luxury: They can experiment with who they are. They can fashion and refashion their identities, and through much of their lives that is just what they do. They can go about this in a lot of ways, but one of the most important methods is what is known and reviled as "consumerism." They experiment with different modes of self-presentation, assert or mask aspects of their individuality, join or leave a series of subcultures, or oppose and adhere to centers of power. It is from this complex mix that the things of the material world become the furnishings of both a social and a personal identity. That's what meaning is.

There are plenty of cultural products that I denigrate. But even when I am on my high horse, my ire is mostly aimed at the artists, not the consumers. There are many artists who simply go through the motions mimicking well-established literary or musical forms, but adding nothing of incremental value to the cultural stew.

In a sense, it is like selling bubble-gum flavored popcorn to the public and calling it a full meal. It is a facsimile of food the same way that Britney Spears is a facsimile of music. But, without Britney Spears, there is no Mick Jagger. And, it is from the low barriers to entry of pop culture participation combined with its experimental and free-flowing feedback loop between artists and consumers that true genius is revealed and that cultural change is fostered.

Steel Cage Death Match: Culture Club vs. Rolling Stones

In 40-50 years time, how much of the music of my youth (1980's) will still be listened to and appreciated?

Some, one would hope, but the 80's seem, in retrospect, to be a somewhat frivolous age, musically speaking. There was a terrible lot of New Wave pop-synth (A Flock of Seagulls, Pet Shop Boys, etc.) as well as big hair metal (Ratt, White Snake, etc.).

Probably the biggest development, musically speaking, would be the birth of rap and hip-hop into a mainstream musical form. But, I am not into it enough to discriminate Tone Loc from Run DMC (ok that's an exaggeration, but you get the point).

Now there is no question that Father Time separates the wheat from the chaff and what I am exposed to from the 60's era is the the cream of its crops, so to speak. Still, if I was trapped on a desert island and had to choose an oldies station that would play 80's hits vs. 60's hits, the 60's wins hands down.

Have a listen... I ain't lying :)

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Rolling+Stones/_/Gimme+Shelter

The lyrics of the song speak of seeking shelter from a coming storm, painting a picture of devastation and social apocalypse while also talking of the power of love:

Oh, a storm is threat'ning,
My very life today;
If I don't get some shelter,
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away, It's just a shot away;
War, children, it's just a shot away, It's just a shot away

A much higher-pitched second vocal track is sung by guest vocalist Merry Clayton. Of her inclusion, Jagger said in the 2003 book According to... The Rolling Stones: "The use of the female voice was the producer's idea. It would be one of those moments along the lines of 'I hear a girl on this track - get one on the phone.' "

Clayton gives her solo performance, and one of the song's most famous pieces, after a solo performed by Richards, repeatedly singing "Rape, murder; It's just a shot away, It's just a shot away," and finally screaming the final stanza.

At about 2:59 into the song, Clayton's voice cracks twice from the strain of her powerful singing; once during the second refrain, on the word "shot" from the last line, and then again during the first line of the third and final refrain, on the word "murder".

She and Jagger finish the song with the line, "Love, sister, it's just a kiss away." To date it remains one of the most prominent contributions to a Rolling Stones track by a female vocalist.