The Mystic and the Muse

The Mystic and the Muse:

Mr. Douthat, whom I first encountered only last week, has a most interesting piece on mysticism.

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever.

He starts thus, but ends better: because his ending has a notion in it of what a mystic might really be.

...that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

What would that mean? None other than that "the heaviest hind may easily come silently and suddenly upon me in a lane," as Saint Mary is reported to have said to King Alfred. It has its clearest expression in the myths of Arthur, where a knight hears a bell deep in a forest, and follows its sound to whatever adventure it leads; or he sees a white stag, and takes the chase to whatever destruction or rebirth it brings him. The mystic is at the root of the tales of Arthur, more than elsewhere.

It is, in other words, that singluar devotion to the chase: to the quest. It is that which leads you beyond the fields that you know, and to strange places that may remake you. That way lies Elfland; or stranger kingdoms, yet.

...the Red Cross Knight climbed with the hermit to the top of the hill and looked out across the valley. There against the evening sky they saw a mountaintop that touched the highest heavens. It was crowned with a glorious palace, sparkling like stars and circled with walls and towers...

To which St. George, in service to the Faerie Queene, might not yet ascend: for he had deeds to do in this world.

People scoff at these stories, as they do -- a bit -- at C. S. Lewis when he wrote in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe of a professor who chided the children to use "logic!" when presented with the impossible. Lucy, the honest child, was the one who spoke of something that could not be; and her honesty should be a guide to the value of her testimony in the face of impossible things as well as with possible ones. In other words, we might yield up our ideas of what is possible in the face of the word of an honest woman, or even a very honest girl.

Last week I attended a lecture on metaphysical modal logic by Dr. E. J. Lowe, who is a fine man and a learned. Modal logic treats what is necessary and what is possible in the world. The good doctor asserts that what is possible and necessary can be understood by grasping the essential truth of the thing being examined; if you know what a thing essentially is, you will know what is necessary for it to exist, and what it may possibly do.

He mentioned bronze sculptures as an example. A sculpture is different from a lump of bronze in several ways; one of them is that its form may not change much if it is to continue being a sculpture. He contrasted a sculpture of Socrates, versus shooting two cannons full of bronze so that -- for an instant! -- they happened to form a similar picture of Socrates in the air.

I had a chance to question him. He agreed to my suggestion that one of the essential qualities of a sculpture was that it was put into a form by an artist (or, if you follow Aristotle, that a form was put into it). I asked him to imagine a case where the two cannons were full of hot bronze, being fired by Jackson Pollack. He takes the largest fused piece, and puts it on a pedestal, calling it his sculpture.

Randomness is not form: it is, logically, the opposite of form. Therefore, we are either mistaken in our definition of what is essential to sculpture... or our modal logic is lying to us about what is necessary and possible in this world.

The good doctor argued that we should simply refrain from calling this "sculpture," in order to preserve the definition. That is the one unsatisfying answer. Both of the alternatives proposed are true: human definitions cannot really capture the world, and therefore a logic based on human definitions cannot tell us what is necessary, nor what is possible.

Besides, Pollack's proposed definition of sculpture is contained within the definition: if sculpture means "having form," then it doesn't mean "without form." Pollack could draw the meaning from the negation of the definition. Modal logic, then, becomes not a proof, but a dare. "We say this cannot be done: prove us wrong." And so we ought to, if we can!

Preserving the concept at the expense of our actual experience is a lie. It is what Edward Abbey called "Indoor Philosophy": it defies the world, because the world won't live up to our ideas about how the world should be. Yet the world remains: and the very honest girl is honest whether she reports the mailman, or an angel.

Lamento di Tristano - La Rotta...

UPDATE: Related is this article on certain philosophers versus Darwin's evolutionary biology. Philosophy is very powerful, and I'm sure all of you know how devoted I am to the art; but you should always start your philosophy with experience and evidence. You should never start simply with concepts, and then instruct the world that it is wrong to behave differently than your reason says it ought to do.

Grim's Hall BC Followup

Grim's Hall Book Club: Next Work

When I first proposed the concept for the club, I had intended that the second book would be Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches. I haven't been able to find an etext version of that, however, and I'd like to try to maintain as much of the club as free and readily accessible online, to ensure we can all participate.

When we discussed it last, several of you endorsed Plutarch, and several Chaucer. I'm going to tap Eric to try to pull a few selections from the works of Plutarch online -- it's a very long work taken as a whole, but Eric's expertise in these things Roman will serve us well.

While he's doing that, why don't we go ahead and do a couple of the Canterbury Tales? Based on our recent discussion of Chaucer, I'd like to do The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale. These are not so very long -- we won't need weeks to read them -- so why not try to aim for those for next week, i.e., a week from this Sunday?

Following that, we'll tackle Plutarch, if Eric has prepared for us a good selection of lives to consider.

A Clash of Foodstuffs

A Clash of Cultures:

Mr. Brooks says the Tea Party members are "Wal-Mart Hippies." I take it he thinks that's a clever line, because I heard him repeat it while watching that clip from the Colbert show a few days ago.

So, what does it mean to shop at Wal-Mart?

In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods....

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

Mr. Brooks is also wrong to say that the Tea Party has a 'mostly negative' agenda: it actually has a positive document that explains precisely how it wants the government to function. It's called "the Constitution of the United States." The thing is, these crazy Tea Party people take it seriously -- they really want the government to function just that way, Tenth Amendment and everything.

Jews/Tolkien Redux

Other Writers on the Jews and Tolkien:

We discussed this issue a few days ago. The main thing seemed to me that the Jews aren't really bothered by "medieval" swords' having been borne against their ancestors, but rather by what their ancestors did with swords during Israel's heroic age. After the Holocaust, their own heroic tradition must seem alien and alienating; whereas Tolkien's tradition, because it was the root of Just War theory and the idea that heroes should protect noncombatants, would only make more sense after World War One and Two.

A few more writers have considered the question since, and some of them (not really Wonkette) have serious thoughts about the issue.

Gene Expression challenges the assertion that Jews don't write fantasy:

Is Christianity fundamentally more comfortable with the pagan than Judaism, as the author above asserts? I doubt it. The basics of Northern fantasy draw from a rich peasant cultural folk tradition which the Christian church ignored at best, and attempted to suppress at worst. The tradition was most robust in the regions which were Christianized last, so that relatively thick cultural memory remained from which to draw during the 19th century Romantic revival of national traditions. It is notable that Ireland in particular in the British Isles preserved its own mythic tradition; I chalk this up to the indigenous origins of Christianization, so that the culture-bearers of the past were not superseded by missionaries who dismissed the indigenous stories as being part & parcel of the pagan intellectual edifice. Tolkien was in part trying to create an Anglo-Saxon mythic cycle from fragments such as Beowulf and Scandinavian analogs. The Irish have no need of reconstruction. Culturally the Jews are very distant from their peasant origins, and naturally much more detached from their pagan past than Northern Europeans. For the past 1,000 years Ashkenazi Jews have been an urban minority, as insulated from the world of faerie as Christian priests. No wonder that Jewish authors, such as Neil Gaiman, draw upon Northern motifs. How popular is urban fantasy as a distinct genre anyway?

Russ Douthat of the New York Times asks why Jews would want a Jewish Tolkien at all.

But once you add up these insights, they jostle uneasily with Weingrad’s professed desire for a Jewish Tolkien, or a Jewish Lewis. What he seems to have demonstrated is that modern fantasy depends on Christianity, or at least a Christian-pagan synthesis of some kind, for its forms, conventions, and traditions. This suggests that you could write a novel that embodies a kind of Jewish critique of fantasy — in much the same way that China Miéville’s novels are a kind of Marxist critique of Tolkien, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” was a feminist critique of Arthurian-based fantasy, Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is an atheist’s critique of C.S. Lewis, and so on. (And indeed, Weingrad’s essay reads Lev Grossman’s new novel “The Magicians” as a kind of crypto-Jewish critique of Narnia and/or Harry Potter.) But the genre itself will remain irreducably Christian, and a truly Judaic fantasy would have to belong to, or invent, a different genre altogether.

Those two posts seem to run straight at each other! So-called "urban fantasy" is a new idea, actually; we used to call that genre "horror," because it was meant to be horrible. Lately it has become fashionable not to dread vampires, but to envy them. The werewolf was supposed to be a symbol of what it would be like for man to lose his humanity, and be turned back into a beast without reason or self-control. It has been converted, lately, a symbol of what it might mean for a man to be more in harmony with nature. Today we are asked to imagine the joy of running down a deer under a full moon, and drinking its blood.

(Mark will thank me for not quoting Chesterton here, on nature religions: "A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.")

That's fantasy, perhaps, but it's not heroic fantasy. It is the notion of heroism that bothers. It is interesting that so many would rather be monsters than dare be heroes. That says much about how difficult it is to be a hero, and how very difficult to believe in one.

It is harder, I think, for some people to believe in heroes than vampires. That is true even though they might meet a hero in the street, while vampires do not exist.

Americaland

Americaland:

When we lived in China, there was a theme park near Hang Zhou that was called "Americaland." It was supposed to be a place you could visit to see what that strange place called America was like. No one would ever give us directions as to how to get there, probably embarrassed about what the stereotypes would reveal.

It's not only the Chinese who have these dreams:

Americaland is real place for British writers, it is built from thousands of fragments of American TV, films, music, comics and other cultural artefacts. It’s a place filled with 1950’s dinners and long desolate highways among other things. And its just as imaginary as a Britain filled with red telephone boxes and bowler hatted business men.

And Swedes! I somehow entirely missed this band called "the Rednex," whom I found tonight entirely by accident while searching for a traditional tune. They are nothing except a Swedish projection on American mythology, especially the mythology of the West.





(The underlying tune is "Orpheus in the Underworld," which was used in Can-can shows across the West.)



(Note the rifles and dog sleds!)





This is a little bit shocking, like discovering that you've been made into a god by superstitious islanders in the South Seas.

A fertility god, at that!

ARMA

ARMA Art, I:

The ARMA has quite a gallery of Medieval and Renaissance art associated with questions of battle. Here is one:

The clear effect of even single-hand sword blows against steel helmets. In the center a sword splits the top of a helm from behind. On the right two swords hack into the sides of helmets while a spiked mace delivers a crushing blow. Notice also the portions of each sword (their center-of percussion) that does most of the striking is invariably the last third to second-half of blade. One rider in the center has an arrow in his cheek that appears to have hit behind his mail coif. On the lower right, a long axe cuts powerfully against a rider’s neck and back of the head, pulling him off his mount. On the ground one fallen fighter has deep shoulder and head wounds while another has a deep cut on the neck. Four different types of helmet are visible. All the shields appear to be medium sized flat heaters. From the gruesome Maciejowski Bible, c. 1250.

Father Sends

My Father Sends...

...a story about a cowboy.

A cowboy from Texas attends a social function where Barack Obama is trying to gather support for his Health Plan. Once he discovers the cowboy is from President Bush's home area, he starts to belittle him by talking in a southern drawl and single syllable words.

As he was doing that, he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head. The cowboy says, "Havin' some problem with them circle flies?"

Obama stopped talking and said, "Well, yes, if that's what they're called, but I've never heard of circle flies."

"Well, sir," the cowboy replies, "Circle flies hang around ranches. They're called circle flies because they're almost always found circling around the back end of a horse."

"Oh," Obama replies as he goes back to rambling.

But, a moment later he stops and bluntly asks, "Are you calling me a horse's ass?"

"No, sir," the cowboy replies, "I have too much respect for the citizens of this country to call their president a horse's ass."

"That's a good thing," Obama responds and begins rambling on once more.

After a long pause, the cowboy in his Texas drawl says, "Sure is hard to fool them flies, though."

Chivalry & Solidarity in Game Theory

"Chivalry & Solidarity in Ultimatum Games"

An interesting game theory experiment from 2001 appears to show that women find it very easy to come to agreements with other women; but men are far readier to accept offers from women than from other men. The two effects are noteworthy, though painting the woman/woman effect as "solidarity" seems a bit odd. It's more likely that they understand each other, and have similar desires to come to agreement; whereas men, who understand each other, want to compete.

By the same token, "chivalry" is the wrong term here; this tendency describes all men who participated. It would have been very great good luck to gather only chivalrous men into the study!

When a woman is his partner in the game, however, a man becomes much less competitive: he is ready to accede to her requests almost at the same rate that women agree to accept/agree with either men or mixed groups. Men facing other men, however, accept offers only if they are much more generous.

The graph on page 184 is the main thing, I think. It shows that actual results are fairer in men/men pairings; but agreement is far more common in female/female pairings. That may mean that women are more interested in agreement than fairness (or gain); but it also may mean that men are more willing to resist authority if they feel it is not treating them fairly. After all, the proposer is in the position of authority where the resource division is involved; all the respondent can do is accept or reject the proposal. Men would rather punish unfair actors than seek agreement, even if that means gaining nothing rather than gaining an unfairly small amount.

Unless, that is, they are receiving the proposal from a woman: then, they're much readier to be treated unfairly!

Another way of saying that, though, is that they are more willing to accept female authority -- fair or unfair -- than they are to accept unfair male authority. From another man, they will only accept fairness.

This only treats initial acceptance, of course. One might later resent being treated unfairly, even if this proves that -- in some cases -- one is readier to be treated unfairly. It's also interesting that both men and women are readier to be treated unfairly by women than by men.

The Cathedral of Dawn:

A find in archæology is startling because of its age, but not because of its purpose.

[U]nder our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization....

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey.

This we have heard before, and wisely.

Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude
or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men
who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men
who were already men were already mystics. They used the rude
and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them.
We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime
too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred
to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.

***

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been
like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting
to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.
But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great
cities long builded and lost for us in the original night;
colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even
the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size
of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square
and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls
standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world.
The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.

There are a few men who have seen so clearly as to be able to predict both the future and the past. Chesterton was one.

(H/t: Lars Walker.)

Kitten

"That Bull Wouldn't Hurt A Kitten."

It's part of the honor of those who work with large and powerful animals that there is a certain danger in the work. Frequently we play that down, amused at those less experienced with the creatures' strength and willfulness; but the danger never passes.

Ricky Weinhold, of Reinholds, was attacked Saturday by a 1-ton bull on a farm where he leased barn space in Wernersville, about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Berks County Deputy Coroner Terri Straka said. The son of the farm's owner found his body Sunday in an outdoor pen.

The property owners had encouraged Weinhold to get rid of the bull, Straka said. She said the same animal believed responsible for the weekend attack rammed Weinhold last summer, breaking several of his ribs.

"He's been known to be temperamental," Straka said. "The property owners just didn't trust him. They told Ricky, 'This bull has got a bad disposition."'

Well, bulls are dangerous. Mr. Weinhold doubtless knew that, and gloried in what he did. Anyone might die in a conflict with a bull, and all must die sooner or later. At least here is a man who lived.

All of which reminds me of a story. It is meant with no disrespect, told in this context. As I said, it is the essentially dangerous nature of the bull that makes it honorable to deal with bulls; so this story is no insult, but a blessing.

A Federal officer stops at a ranch in Montana, and talks with an old rancher. He tells the rancher, 'I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs. The old rancher says, 'Okay, but do not go in that field over there.'

The officer verbally explodes saying, 'Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me.' Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removes his badge and proudly displays it to the farmer. 'See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish...on any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?'

The old rancher nods politely, apologizes, and goes about his chores. A short time later, the old rancher hears loud screams and sees the officer running for his life chased close behind by the rancher's prize bull. With every step the bull is gaining ground on the officer, and it seems likely that he'll get "horned" before he reaches safety.

The old rancher throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs..... "Your badge! Show him your badge!"

Of course, in real life a Federal officer needs a warrant as well. Not, that is, that bulls are any more impressed with the one than with the other.

Zebras and Mules

Zebras and Mules:

How much can you know by deduction from facts you already know? A famous thought experiment ponders the question:

Suppose you are at a zoo in ordinary circumstances standing in front of a cage marked ‘zebra’; the animal in the cage is a zebra, and you believe zeb, the animal in the cage is a zebra, because you have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts. It occurs to you that zeb entails not-mule, it is not the case that the animal in the cage is a cleverly disguised mule rather than a zebra. You then believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb. What do you know? You know zeb, since, if zeb were false, you would not have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts; instead, you would have empty-cage percepts, or aardvark-in-a-cage percepts, or the like. Do you know not-mule? If not-mule were false, you would still have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts (and you would still believe zeb, and you would still believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb). So you do not know not-mule. But notice that we have:

(a) You know zeb

(b) You believe not-mule by recognizing that zeb entails not-mule

(c) You do not know not-mule.

Knowledge by deduction would normally permit you to reason to not-mule; this experiment suggests we may not be able to do that with confidence.

Of course, all this turns on the question of whether you could really cleverly disguise a mule to look like a zebra. Compare and contrast:






More contrasting than comparing, isn't there? From the shape of the ears to the general confirmation, there's no comparison. Of course, you can breed a donkey to a zebra, and then you get something that looks a lot like a cleverly disguised mule:



But it's neither a mule nor a zebra. It's a zonkey.

The real answer to the question, though, is not "Can I really know if I'm looking at a zonkey or a zebra?" Rather, the real question is, "Whose job is it to be able to know how to tell the difference?" The thought experiment errs by assuming that just because person X can't tell the difference, knowledge isn't possible. It is possible, though, for the zoologist; and he's probably the one who put the sign on the cage. So, can person X know that he's looking at a not-mule? Yes, if the zoologist can be trusted.

Bill Whittle wrote about that, once. That's why the climate-change apostasy is so disturbing: it's a direct assault on that web of trust upon which civilization is founded.

Tolkien Wasn't Jewish

Tolkien and Judaism:

Did you know that there was talk of a Nazi edition of The Hobbit?

When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

The article goes on to wonder why there are no Jews in the top authors of fantasy literature. Tolkien's remark about giftedness is clearly on point: the author of this piece can unselfconsciously wonder about "an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare." Who besides the Jews could honestly claim that there was only one literary genre in which they were rare? Not many!

The investigation is an interesting one.

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience.

It goes deeper than this, though, if I may say so. Jewish thinkers have very often been suspicious not merely of feudal or medieval ethics, but of heroic ethics. I suspect the reason has to do not nearly so much with our history or literature, as with their own.

After the battle is won, the Israelites capture the five fleeing Ammonite kings. Joshua drags the monarchs before him and orders his generals to "put your feet on the neck of these kings." As they stand on the kings' throats, Joshua tells his commanders, "Do not be afraid or dismayed: Be strong and courageous; for thus the Lord will do to all the enemies against whom you fight." Then, Joshua himself executes the kings and hangs their bodies in the trees. This episode is so proudly barbaric that it's painful to read. It's clear that we readers are supposed to take the Israelites' side here—they're conquering the Promised Land, they're God's Chosen People, the Ammonites are vile statue-worshippers, etc.—but the unapologetic savagery is hard to bear. This probably reveals a profound weakness in me, but I imagined myself—in the way one always imagines oneself inside a book—not as one of my own ancestors, the victorious Israelite generals, but as a heathen king with a boot on my neck, moments from a brutal death.

Joshua and the Israelites have been doing nothing but killing in this book—killing by the thousands, killing women, killing children, killing animals—but it is the death of these five men, who aren't even innocents, that inspires the most revulsion. There's an obvious reason for this, one Stalin understood: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." All the other killings in Joshua are mass killings. This is the only time the book of Joshua gives us death in a tight close-up, and it's appalling.

The rest of the chapter is gruesome, but in the statistical way. Joshua sweeps from city to city across southern Canaan, sacking them one after another:

Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining …
Then Joshua passed on … to Libnah … He struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it …
To Lacshish … He took it on the second day, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it …
Gezer … Joshua struck him and his people, leaving him no survivors …
To Eglon … [They] struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day … etc. etc.

The worst parts of Leviticus seem positively joyful compared with this smug roster of slaughter.

Read that in the echo of the Holocaust, and you can begin to understand why there is little interest in writing Jewish heroic fiction. The tradition they would naturally draw on leads directly to a soul-shaking conflict, for their own heroes treated the women and children of fallen nations in a way that has to be horrifyingly familiar.

Consider Simone Weil's War and the Iliad as a counterexample. Weil was Jewish by ancestry, though she became a Christian mystic after a religious experience at Assisi. Her work is characterized as "an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost." She actually calls it "the only true epic the Occident possesses," standing head and shoulders over all the other great poems and tales of the West because it treated the slain with the same sympathy as the slayers.

It may be the only poem that ever has, not merely in the West. Yet it is no accident that Tolkien's Catholicism could stand as a root for a recovery of the heroic tradition, even in the wake of World War II. It was the Catholic tradition that gave rise to the concept that the hero defends the innocent as well as fighting his enemies; and that their women and children are not legitimate targets.

The Peace and Truce of God was a medieval European movement of the Catholic Church that applied spiritual sanctions in order to limit the violence of private war in feudal society.

This was the tradition that invented the idea of loving enemies even as you fought them. It was this tradition that first introduced the idea a warrior could swear himself to the service of a lady, rather than regarding her as a mere prize or slave. (Contrast part 1 of Mr. Plotz's essay on the Book of Joshua, wherein women are normally prostitutes!)

It is not, then, simply that the Jews of the Middle Ages suffered from the swords of knights -- though they certainly did, at times. It is that modern heroic literature is rooted in a concept of what it means to be a hero that is originally Catholic; it is not rooted in Jewish epics, in the ancient Greek epics, any more than it is rooted in Chinese or "Aryan" epics. If Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were the first to pull it forward, it is because they were closest to the garden in which it grew.

Let that not be the last word! The modern world needs heroes, and it needs heroes from precisely this tradition. If Jewish writers want to tackle heroic writing, this is the road to take: one that views their enemies as potential friends, and their enemies' innocents as sacred. Anyone who can write in that tradition will be improving our world: we need far more of that vision than we've had.

Unfortunately, the essay ends pointed in another direction. The final example, of what the author hopes is an emerging tradition of Jewish heroic fiction, is merely self-obsessed.

[T]heir deepest struggles are expressed in the language of contemporary self-actualization. “Before I can return with you to any human realm and be who you expect me to be,” Yonatan tells the empress with whom he has fallen in love, “I have to deal with who I am.” The empress meanwhile learns that, to fulfill her own magical quest, she must discover that “the abyss is within you … you must jump into the depths within yourself.” Yanai’s former involvement in Israel’s New Age culture—she wrote for a prominent New Age magazine, spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, and edited a volume of literary erotica by women before turning to fantasy—makes itself felt here.

The author says that he would hesistate to give the book to a teenager, because it contains nothing they don't already know. Self-esteem is not the reward the hero seeks. Honor is sacrifice. It is repaid not with self-love but with the love of those you have served.

For Tolkien's tradition, it was both God and one's beloved that one served, in the hope of love. As Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willhelm said to his knights, "There are two rewards that await us: heaven, and the recognition of noble women." For those who wish to write in another tradition, you can speak of service to the ethic of heroism instead of service to God; you can speak of service to any beloved person or community. Yet it is service that defines.

The Declaration of Arbroath

The Declaration of Arbroath:

In an interview with a Tea Party founding member, there is this quote on what to do with certain celebrity figures trying to associate themselves:

She, like many Tea Party members, resists the idea of a Tea Party leader — “there are a thousand leaders,” she says.

Glenn Beck? “He can be a Tea Partier, but it’s not like the movement bends to him.”

Sarah Palin? She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support, Ms. Carender said, adding, “And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.”

That's the spirit! Robert the Bruce would have understood, since his supporters had the same opinion:

Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

It must not be enough that a person says the right things; we need them to do the right things. These things will be hard, but it is time to start taking apart the anti-constitutional parts of the Federal government, and restoring the Constitutional order. The Federal government certainly has a role, but it is a role limited by enumerated powers, balanced and checked.

What? Actually Vote?

What? Actually Vote?

Senator Bunning apparently stood up for making his colleagues do their job. Alone of all the Senators, he objected to a 'unanimous consent' call for an extension of expiring stimulus spending.

“It is simply unfair for one senator to attempt to hold the Senate hostage on this issue,” Durbin said. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told POLITICO that it’s “just awful,” and that Bunning’s objection could turn off televisions for millions of households with satellite dishes, since the package has provisions dealing with that issue.“You’ve got to be pretty mad about something to stop that,” Rockefeller said of Bunning.

It's "unfair" to allow one Senator to prevent a "unanimous" vote?

As for turning off people's TVs, so they'll have to pay attention to the hole we are digging for ourselves: Good!

Addiction

So, What Do We Mean By "Addiction"?

The case for treating sex as an addiction:

In the last week of treatment, he and his doctors mapped out what his life would look like back home after recovery. He sees a counselor and goes to a 12-step recovery program. "In my first 365 days after treatment, I went to 523 meetings," he says.

Early on in his recovery he did sometimes look at Internet pornography, but a software program he installed on his computer alerted his wife and sponsor in his support group, and he stopped looking at porn.

Gradually, Rogers says, he learned how to have a healthy sex life with his wife.

"That's what we aim for," Parker says. "We're not trying to turn someone into a monk. He needs to learn how to have sex like a gentleman."

The case against:

As Tiger Woods undergoes treatment, T. Byram Karasu—the University Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College—says medicalizing normal human behavior doesn’t help anyone....

The treatment for sexual addiction is a form of pseudo-redemptive window dressing in which no one, especially the addict himself, really believes.

Sexual addiction is not like other addictions. Unlike addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes, in which the craving is induced by external elements, sexual craving, by its nature, is an innate and natural phenomenon. And sex addiction is a specific situation—the frequency of erection and the intensity of orgasm—dependent on the person’s blood-level of testosterone.

It's interesting that the "for" case posits a treatment different from the similar 12-step treatment for alcoholism, which I have always heard requires you to stop drinking entirely. Medical doctors being so very interested in our animality, the assumption is that one cannot abandon sex entirely and be 'healthy,' since sexuality is normal and natural, and therefore ought to be present in reasonable amounts.

Eating and drinking are also normal and natural behaviors, and one can certainly point to gluttony as a problem not only for the glutton but those around him or her; but one really can't stop eating, whereas one actually can stop having sex. Indeed, the practice of celibacy has enjoyed a high reputation through most of human history: it is supposed to have numerous benefits, so I have heard. Fasting, the closest analog, can only ever be a temporary condition.

Would we say that the same mechanism is at work in gluttony and unchaste behavior? Sometimes there is at least the additional aspect of deception; gluttony is usually practiced openly, whereas one can openly sleep with lots of other people if and only if one is unmarried. Leaving deception aside, though, it does seem to be an unnatural focus of pleasure in only one otherwise natural process.

Here, too, we return to alcohol addiction: the enjoyment of a glass of wine or a fine ale has such a long history -- at least since the dawn of civilization, and quite possibly explaining the dawn of civilization -- that it would be a little strange to view it as non-natural behavior at this point. It would be nice if we could develop a 'therapy' that allowed a man to 'drink like a gentleman,' instead of abandoning the normal as well as the unnatural pleasure. Why can't we do that? Or can we?

There’s one element of the Sinclair Method that may surprise some people. The patient must continue drinking alcohol for the treatment to be successful. The drug naltrexone must be taken in conjunction with alcohol in order to be effective. While the drug may reduce the desire for alcohol so much that a patient eventually ends up giving up alcohol completely, abstaining from alcohol on a permanent basis is not a requirement of this treatment. One of the main goals is to get destructive, problem drinking under control so that a person can live a normal life.

It may be that there is a common root, then: the reward systems of the brain getting out of whack, and needing to be reset. Abstinence may be one way of doing that, and simply blocking the chemical rewards may be another. That would tend to explain why we can have apparently addictive behaviors in natural, innate things like sexuality or eating of food; but does it also explain unnatural behaviors like methamphetamine abuse?

Saving Money

How to Save Money, Federal Government Edition:

Dennis the Peasant has a wider complaint with this, but I'd like to focus on just one aspect of it.

By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.

In other words, 'We're going to look for ways to disqualify low bidders in order to pay more for products and services than we do currently.'

This appears to me to be a method to raise, across the board, the cost of everything the government buys. Thus, the government will become more expensive even if it were simply to maintain current levels of services; but we'd also like (says the administration) to add a bunch of new services related to health care, environmental regulations, etc.

They really do not understand that there will soon be no more money. No one in the White House has even begun to think about it, to grapple with it, or to consider how we might address the problem.

Interesting

Interesting:

The VA is going to take another look at Gulf War Syndrome.

Poli Corr Mascot

Politically Correct Mascot:

Our friend Major Leggett has a suggestion for a new mascot for Ole Miss, which continues its ongoing efforts to cleanse itself of any sense of having anything to do with Southern history. They don't play the fight song anymore, but maybe they won't have to change the name of the team:

I am the former Admiral of the fleet of the Galactic Rebellion. I spend much of my time now looking into new ways to use my skills as a leader of Rebels. Currently my interests are in-line with those of the University of Mississippi, which, as fate would have it, is in search of a new leader for its Rebels.

Personally, I can think of a symbol that would be more apt even than that. We all know that the Democratic Party has been out front all along in pushing for political correctness, so nothing could be safer than to adopt their own symbol as an expression of your submission to these principles.

Nothing could be safer, that is, except if it also wears an Army safety belt!



Now, that's a safe mascot!

I want one

I Want One:

The Dictionary of Old English sounds like something I would love to be able to use.

Healey was quick to point out that the dictionary is consulted by scholars in a wide range of fields and disciplines: social historians who are studying words for rank and class, historians of economics who are examining records and terms of early taxes, and researchers of many stripes who are interested in working with the early form of a language in a linguistically pure environment as is presented by the corpus.

After listing all these reasonable arguments for why we need a dictionary of Old English she added, almost as an afterthought “Plus, it’s our language.”

It is our language indeed, and these four words from it that she uttered in an afterthoughtish way made me feel fiercely interested in seeing the rest of the words after the letter G defined. And this makes me think how odd it is that we are such ardent admirers of museums full of partially reconstructed bone fragments, taken from animals that are millions of years removed from us, and yet we find it so difficult to warm to Old English. While it is true that this is a dead language, it has died so recently (at least compared with the dinosaurs whose fossils are perennially alluring) that the corpse is still warm.

You can see the roots and traces of our language, evident even in the words that did not quite survive until the present day. Bealofus (liable to sin) did not last into our vocabulary, having been pushed out by the upstart and Latinate peccable (we apparently do not need more than a single word for this concept). But the bealoful of yesteryear became the baleful of today, and so even though bealofus lost the evolutionary battle it still tickles the familiar to see it there.

It's important to our concepts in other ways, too. Consider this piece on American Exceptionalism, a very current debate, which makes a reference to Benjamin Franklin's name.

The traditional Marxist claim about the U.S. was that it was governed by the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. This was not intended as a compliment, but it was largely true. Look at the archetypal American, Benjamin Franklin, whose name comes from the Middle English meaning freeman, someone who owns some property. Napoleon dismissed the British as “a nation of shopkeepers”; we are a nation of Franklins.

Actually, most of us don't hold land in the way a "Franklin" would have, i.e., in fee simple while owning no duties to anyone. The word shows the introduction of Norman concepts to England, as you can see by the way the etymology goes back to Middle English, but then veers off into Anglo-French and from there to Old French. The original members of the class had not been "franklins" in Old English, but thanes (as we are reminded by the character of Cedric the Saxon in Ivanhoe). The thanes had a connection of service, as knights did: the class was defined by their military service to the king. The Norman conquest stripped that from most of them, but left a class that had property and a certain strength, and so were left alone. Thus, they went from being 'retainers' to being 'freeholders' -- liberated, yet also lowered, since it was their service that entitled them to be considered members of the aristocracy. This, too, mirrors the knights -- they were a lower class than the nobility, but their status as being members of the overall aristocracy was in virtue of their service.

If we are 'a nation of Franklins,' then, we are a nation of free men -- but men who owe no service to the society or the government. That is at once a strength and a weakness.

God Gap

Foreign Policy Needs More God:

So says the Chicago Council on Foreign Policy, at the conclusion of a study.

American foreign policy is handicapped by a God gap, a narrow, ill-informed and "uncompromising Western secularism" that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures, and fails to engage and encourage religious groups that promote peace, human rights and the general welfare of their communities....

American foreign policy's God gap has been noted by others in recent years, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "Diplomats trained in my era were taught not to invite trouble. And no subjects seemed more inherently treacherous than religion," she said in 2006.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment's reluctance to engage religion continues today, the task force says. "The role of nationalism and decolonization was not widely understood in the U.S. until after the Vietnam War, despite considerable supporting evidence in the 1950s. Such is the case with religion today," says the task force's report, released at a conference at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.

"Religion has been rapidly increasing as a factor in world affairs, for good and for ill, for the past two decades. Yet the U.S. government still tends to view it primarily through the lens of counterterrorism policy. The success of American diplomacy in the next decade will not simply be measured by government-to-government contacts, but also by its ability to connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion."

This is indeed a critical weakness in U.S. policy, but not merely because of some sort of sentimental attachment to secularism. There are actually very solid reasons why American officials have more trouble talking in religious terms than, say, officials from the U.K. The British government, similar to ours in many respects, has an official church: the Church of England. The U.S. government has in the 1st Amendment a rejection of the 'establishment' of a national church.

As a result, any U.S. official making a religious statement can speak only in the most bland and unobjectionable terms; or he has to speak as a private citizen, making very clear that his personal sense and feelings have absolutely nothing to do with the policy of his government. That latter position strips any power out of what he might say; the former prevents any power from being present in the first place.

The official in the U.K. has 'top cover' in the sense that, because there is a doctrine that he can appeal to as the official faith of his country, he's got a lot more depth and range that he can invoke here.

So, what do we do about the 'God gap'? There's really not very much we can do. We can bring in more people with religious backgrounds to speak in addition to our diplomats and and other officers. We can go out of our way to show respect for religious practice.

The report had four specific recommendations, but point 4 is going to be problematic for the reason listed above. Essentially, they argue that we should stop talking about religious freedom, because that is seen as a kind of 'cultural imperalism' in places without religious freedom. Unfortunately, that's the one thing we can talk about; it's the one kind of 'official doctrine' to which our diplomats can appeal. "We believe in honoring your religion, along with all the others," sounds like weak tea, but apparently it's too strong.

There are not a lot of good answers here. This may be one area where our form of government has a structural weakness. The principle of religious freedom has also provided us with a great internal strength; and there are some people in the world outside our borders who likewise aspire to it (although always fewer than not, since 'religious freedom' is about the freedom of minorities, since the majority already has religious freedom by virtue of main force. Thus, religious freedom is most commonly about the freedom of others, others you probably believe to be necessarily different from yourself in a crucial way).

Hooah

Hooah.

This guy is my kind of guy. Mr. David Benke stopped a school shooter 'with the faith of his body,' as they used to say: wagering his life against a killer, and saving many others in the process. He also came away unhurt himself, whereas had everyone cowered he could well have been shot. This proves the truth of the proverb, 'He that will lose his life, that same shall save it.'

Also in good news today, car thieves meet Air Force security. These are things that make you feel good while you have your coffee.

Poison in the Well

Poison in the Well:

An interesting bit of history that I had never heard before.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Can you imagine the havoc that would be created if the government, today, were accused of poisoning crack cocaine or methamphetamine in an effort to scare off users?

Class War

"Class War"

That is the title of a Reason piece that portrays the public sector pension crisis as a case of public servants versus the rest of us.

Although Americans may have a vague sense that the nation has run up a great deal of debt, the public employee benefit problem is not well known. Yet the wave of benefit promises is poised to wash away state and local government budgets and large portions of the incomes of most Americans. Most of these benefits are vested, meaning that they have the standing of a legal contract. They cannot be reduced. And the government employees’ allies, such as California’s legislative Democrats, are cleverly blocking some of the more obvious exit strategies.

For instance, when the city of Vallejo went bankrupt after coughing up 75 percent of its budget to police and firefighters, the state Assembly introduced legislation that would allow cities to go bankrupt only if they get approval from a commission. Such a commission would of course be dominated by union-friendly members. The result: Cities would be stuck making good on contracts they cannot afford to fulfill....

That money will come from taxpayers. The average private-sector worker, who enjoys a lower salary and far lower retirement benefits than New York or California government workers, will have to work longer, retire later, and pay more so that his public-employee neighbors can enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.

He Was Right!

He Was Right!

Dad29 says: "He Said 'If You Elect Me the Seas Will Stop Rising,' and he was right"!

In the Instapundit sense, anyway.

Who built America?

Who Built America?

Thomas Freidman is talking about nation building in America again, which raises an interesting question. When we do 'nation building' in other countries, we're talking about using a relatively functional organization -- the US military, with State Department and other assistance -- to improve services in non-functional areas like parts of Afghanistan. America itself, though, is a 'functioning area' if anything is: problems with corruption and bad philosophy in our government aside, if America doesn't work than nothing can be said to be functional.

So, do we need "nation building"? Well, maybe, if you mean (as he seems to mean) infrastructure improvement projects. The Federal government certainly has a role in improving interstate commerce by building, say, roads across multiple states or bridges between two states.

How have we built the infrastructure we have? Let's look at a few examples.

The railroads: The Federal role here was limited to crafting a system that would encourage and reward private industry in building the rail system. They were paid bribes, essentially, in terms of the land that they were granted along the railway route, which they could sell or lease to raise funds. That paid for the construction of the railroad; after it was built, it operated on a for-profit basis.

The highways: The Interstate System was based on Dwight D. Eisenhower's support for a network of highways connecting the nation. He got the idea from the Lincoln Highway, the first intercontinental road, which was apparently built by a private group. Automobile manufacturers were important in funding the Lincoln Highway, and in lobbying for the Interstate System. The Federal role here was to help the states organize their efforts, and provide some funding.

The airport system: This, again, was a partnership between industry and (local) government. The cities of America have had a leading role here, with states supporting them. The Federal role has been smaller; but there has also been a large degree of input in terms of money and leadership from private industry.

The telephone network: This has been very largely a private investment, with the government serving a regulatory role either to avoid, or to manage, monopolies in certain areas. The same is true for cell phone networks.

The internet: The government played a major role in the formation of the internet, though private investment has expanded it in many ways. Government continues to sit in regulation on the basic structure of the thing, but new additions to the network are very often based on private companies, groups or individuals who have information they wish to add. Many of these provide their own infrastructure up to a point, and normally pay for access through their privately-owned Internet Service Provider.

We could go on and consider oil pipelines, deep-water ports, etc., but I think the point has been made.

The government has certainly had a role in the building of the infrastructure of America. Sometimes this has been a leadership role, and sometimes it has mostly been about arranging funding; and sometimes it hasn't led and it hasn't funded, but it's regulated the provision of privately-created services.

All of these models are before us if we talk about "nation building in America." I'd like to know two things about any such proposal:

1) What is this new system that needs to be built, which we don't already have in the sense that we "didn't have" a railroad or an Interstate System until it was built?

2) Which model of Federal leadership are you proposing? The one where they find ways to spur private investment (like the railroads)? The one where they take control of an existing private system (like the AT&T breakup)? Or the one like the Internet, where it really builds something new and then lets private groups add on?

Paranoia

Choices:

Three items today.

First:

Moving to her criticism of the president’s spending, Bachmann pointed to a chart of rising federal deficits.

“This is intending to fail,” she said.

“They have left us holding an invoice of $105 trillion in unfunded federal liabilities,” she went on, alluding to the federal government’s entitlement programs. “Sounds to me like someone is choosing decline.”

Second:

Two years after Buckley’s death, the John Birch Society is no longer banished; it is listed as one of about 100 co-sponsors of the 2010 CPAC.

Why is the Birch Society a co-sponsor?

“They’re a conservative organization,” said Lisa Depasquale, the CPAC Director for the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “ Beyond that I have no comment.”

On its website, the Birch Society describes it mission as to “to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government, or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence. The John Birch Society endorses the U.S. Constitution as the foundation of our national government, and works toward educating and activating Americans to abide by the original intent of the Founding Fathers. We seek to awaken a sleeping and apathetic people concerning the designs of those who are working to destroy our constitutional Republic.”

Third:

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.

Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."

In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing.

Making America Work

Making It Work:

The Economist has a strong piece on the subject of success in American politics. Why, they begin, are things looking so hard for Washington, D.C.? Blame Obama:

Although a Democratic president is in the White House and Democrats control both House and Senate, Mr Obama has been unable to enact health-care reform, a Democratic goal for many decades. His cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions has passed the House but languishes in the Senate. Now a bill to boost job-creation is stuck there as well. Nor is it just a question of a governing party failing to get its way. Washington seems incapable of fixing America’s deeper problems. Democrats and Republicans may disagree about climate change and health, but nobody thinks that America can ignore the federal deficit, already 10% of GDP and with a generation of baby-boomers just about to retire. Yet an attempt to set up a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission has recently collapsed—again....

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

So, it turns out that obeying the 10th Amendment's restriction on Federal powers is not just the right thing to do for constitutional reasons. It is also the more effective way to enact the policy you prefer. If you're willing to set your goal as "Changing the way we do things in California," or "Making Massachusetts better," you can accomplish a lot -- and with low constitutional hurdles to clear.

If what you want to do is "Change America," that's going to be harder. It's supposed to be hard. America has always been big -- even the 13 original states, in an era before railroads and other motorized travel covered a substantial area. It has always been diverse, with agricultural areas and urban ones; with different religious groups and interests, and immigrants from everywhere.

The model is designed to let different parts of this big, diverse nation do different things. You're supposed to be able to live the way you want in Tennessee, if you can't in Boston. That's the idea.

If it's hard to wrench the ship of state to a new course on a whim, it's supposed to be. The Federal government has wide powers to alter those few things that are really supposed to be its job. The Bush administration, which wanted little authority over the day to day lives of Americans, wielded tremendous and decisive authority in international affairs: and of course they could do so, because that was a legitimate area for the Federal government to exercise wide authority. Therefore, the Founders designed the system to support that kind of action.

If it's hard to force legislation on the country at the Federal level, good. Maybe you should stop and do something else instead. The only new Federal laws we really need are laws to repeal some of the existing over-regulation of our daily lives; and to reduce the percentage of our paycheck-to-paycheck wealth that the Federal government intends to suck up and spend.

Aside from that, we've got all the Federal laws we need.

Against Mothers in Combat

Against Mothers in Combat:

Hoover considers the question. Can we make this distinction? I'm putting the question particularly to my female readers, who are a stalwart lot on the matter of women having the right to compete on equal terms. So? Does motherhood make the difference Hoover thinks it does, or not? If so, why? If not, why not?

He's had all he can stand.

A pilot furious with the Internal Revenue Service crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, that houses federal tax employees, setting off a raging fire.

I wonder how much more of this we'll see.

The Roots of Morality

The Roots of Morality:

Many modern philosophers are under the impression that humanity sort-of invents morality. This is not Protagoras' "Man is the Measure of All Things" concept, although like most of the problematic moral issues of the modern era there are ancient echoes of bad ideas long abandoned. Rather, this is rooted in the writings of Immanuel Kant on moral philosophy, although those who followed him have run with it well past his own writings (which presuppose the existence of God, though Kant doesn't believe we can have reason to believe in God; and state that the 'moral legislation' we are doing can only produce laws that are in accord with the moral laws that would be acceptable to a 'holy will').

The normal condition has been to assume that any 'moral law' is rooted in nature, whether because God put it there or because it arises from evolutionary success. Dogs and other canids have a clear moral structure, as do other advanced animals.

We talk about the dogs and horses a lot, because they mirror our own ethics in useful ways (though the animals are quite distinct biologically, unlike the primates who may be more similar to us). Since this is the year of the Tiger, though, it might be worth looking at how a Tiger would 'legislate' morality.

If Kant were right, a tiger who evolved into a rational being would abandon eating other rational beings -- he would be able to understand Kant's 'categorical imperative,' and would reason that it was wrong to use other rational beings as means to his ends.

Is that plausible? Would a rational tiger reason any such thing? Or would he use his reason to decide that nature had made him an efficient predator, and that it was his duty to keep others strong by removing the weak and stupid from the gene pool?

If that's right, the concept that humanity is in charge of morality is an illusion; our reason doesn't create morality, but is merely used to ratify what we already believe by nature. Where we disagree -- some people are quite willing to prey on others -- we resolve the issue not by reason, but by force (which appears to me to be another law of nature).

It's only a thought experiment, since there isn't any rational tiger. Still, what do you think?

Socialist Books

Books Are Good:

Some books are better than others, but what really matters is what you do with the books you read. If these books are to help you understand a problem in American society, and route around it, that's one thing; if they're inspiration and a roadmap for you, that's something else.

Good catch.

Comments "Upgrade"

Comments "Upgrade"

The threatened promised upgrade to the Echo comments system has arrived. I realize that some of you didn't like it very much, but I didn't find anything else that would be any better; and any other change would have resulted in the loss of the 20,000+ existing comments, which would annoy me (though I archived them as xml files, we would have no practical access to them).

Good luck with the new system. I hate change as much as the rest of you, I assure you. :)

Palin on Tea Parties

Mrs. Palin on Tea Parties:

So, we just finished saying that one of the most important contributions Mrs. Palin might have to the Tea Party movement was in helping it learn what it needs to do to compete for power. It happens that she spoke to that issue tonight.



You can skip the first bit, where O'Reilly is talking to himself. He wants to say that the Tea Party movement needs to do a William Buckley and cast the extremists from its ranks; but that's not the real question. The real question has to do with how the bulk of the movement can pursue an agenda without a central authority. He's missing the point; she seems to be onto it.

Daring Young Men

Daring Young Men:

What do you know about the Berlin Airlift?

[An important work of history-since-1945 devoted] less than a page to the airlift. That caused Reeves to wonder whether the 277,500 high-risk, expensive flights through Soviet airspace to supply food and fuel to the West Berliners had disappeared in the mists of history.

Students questioned by Reeves said they had never heard of the airlift. Reeves' contemporaries generally guessed the effort had occurred during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, not the presidency of Harry S. Truman 13 years earlier.

Unable to restrain his enthusiasm, Reeves told audiences about Truman's heroic decision to supply Berlin by air, in the face of objections from his cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it would be impossible to feed a city of more than two million by using cargo planes.

"Then I would babble on about the daring young men (and some women) from the States and Great Britain being pulled away from their new lives, their wives, their schools, their work for the second time in five or six years," Reeves writes. "This time they were supposed to feed the people they had been trying to kill, and who had been trying to kill them, only three years earlier."

Much of the mission in Iraq has been of the same nature. America may not be the only power in history that so readily forgives former enemies, and bends itself wholly to their good when they are ready to be friends instead; but it must be in rare company.

The Pirate Queen

The Pirate Queen:

So, via Dr. Althouse, some fellow has gone to a lot of trouble to photoshop Mrs. Palin to remove everything he calls 'glamorous' about her.

Result? It demonstrates that her loveliness, which is genuine, is not a result of the make-up or hairstyle. If anything, several of the retouches make her beauty clearer by removing distractions. (I always took the beehive hairdo as a way of playing down her beauty, since it's not normally associated with beauty. And since when is taking off the glassess supposed to be the way that you make a woman less glamorous? That runs counter to every movie Hollywood ever made. She really has these people spinning.)

My suspicion, however, is that you could photoshop her with a pirate hat, a scar across her face, and an eyepatch without changing anyone's mind.

Dr. Althouse says, "This is an effort at defeminizing Sarah — like drawing a mustache on her." Given her sense of humor, I won't be surprised if she turns up soon on a FOX broadcast wearing a fake moustache. If she did, it would only increase my sense of admiration.

What do people like about her? It's as if no one has understood. It's not just that she went to small, state schools; it's not just that she did local news and beauty pagents before she became a small-town mayor. It's very much that she does things like write notes on her hand because she still gets nervous in interviews and forgets even the most basic things she wanted to say. Yes, she does; and everyone who has ever had to speak in front of a group can relate to the pressure, while imagining how much worse it must be for someone the media longs to destroy and humiliate. What is amazing is that she doesn't let it stop her: she writes a note on her hand, and goes right ahead.

She's ordinary, yet has managed -- through discipline, through these little tricks, and through the strength of the family she and her husband have built -- to succeed at what she has set out to do. When she hits a wall, she finds a way to climb it.

Of course people admire her. She happens also to be lovely. Good that she is; why shouldn't she be?

Cossacks

Cossacks:

For Doc Russia.



A good piece! Here's another:

Year of the Tiger

Year of the Tiger!

We were in China for the Lunar New Year in 2001, and let me tell you, it is a thing to see. This year is the Year of the Tiger, which is the sign that stood over the year in which I was born.

Tigers are said to be most compatible with horses and dogs. Chinese tradition holds also that tigers love to resist authority, are unable to resist a challenge when honor is involved, and provide excellent protection against the danger of burglary.

What was your year of birth, in the Chinese system? They poured thousands of their finest minds into developing it, over hundreds of years: did it work? How much does the system match what you find to be true of yourself?

GHBC 34-53

Grim's Hall Book Club: Bendigo Shafter, Chapters 34-47

Perhaps due to the Super Bowl, we are a week behind here. With your permission, I'll go ahead and include both weeks' readings here.

This is the climax and dénouement of the book. Ben goes to New York City and wins his love; he returns to duty, helping people along the way survive a snowstorm that drifts over the tracks. (Easy to feel some sympathy for that bit of the plot, for those of you up north!) They go to the medicine wheel and resolve the last fight with the rogue Shoshone.

Some last questions about the book:

1) What do you think about how the town turns out, and the future plans of the main characters?

2) We should talk about the question of what constitutes a proper education. Drake Morrell ends up being highly praised, after his initial introduction as a murderer on the run. He introduces the children of the backwoods to Latin, classics, history, and many of the things that Bendigo has been introduced to as well.

L'amour describes the effect of this education as "pride of bearing and appearance, as well as a love for knowledge," but "not... 'scholarship,' for that is often a different thing."

Is this the right vision of education? If so, why? If not, what is missing?

3) What do you think of how Webb turned out? Was it what you expected from the early foreshadowing? Is he a virtuous character, or not?

Finally, there's a last question:

What should we read next? I had originally intended to follow some of Ben's education, and we could talk about which of those books he read that we might want to read also.

However, it occurs to me that it might be a good idea -- given recent discussions -- to branch into some material that concerns our recent debates. We've debated some descriptions in Chaucer in isolation from his broader works; it might be good to read one of the Canterbury Tales (I am thinking of the Wife of Bath's tale, which you might describe as an early feminist take on the story of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall). We could also look at some classic texts on how men and women view each other, both by Medieval and Renaissance men and women; Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette, perhaps, along with some of the Marie de France or Christine de Pizan stories. That might give us a deeper view of that material.

I'm quite open to your opinions here. Please chime in, and let's discuss it.

Sledding:

Romantic Love and Practical Service:

The Lady of the Lake, a post from 2008 that was one of the most discussed ever written here, talked about how the courtly love tradition allowed men to channel their romantic love into practical service. It examined how this form of chivalrous love is an ethic of willful service, one to the other; how this service diffused the tensions that endangered feudal bonds, and instead let a knight serve his lady as energetically as he might serve his lord; and thereby opened the way for women to occupy positions of genuine power in the Medieval period.

Such service needn't be grand, though. One might channel the romantic energy of the holiday into something as practical as making lunch:



Some lucky marriages incorporate this broader ethic of love and willful service. In time faithful service may win a lady's love, and her friendship; and her heart, so that she feels a duty to serve in turn. That is what gives you the strength for harder times. I have missed the last two Valentine's days, but we survived on stores laid in earlier years; and now is the hour for refilling the store, while we may, against future troubles that may come.

Happy Valentine's Day.

St. Valentine's Day

St. Valentine's Day:

This video is said to be the St. Valentine's Day concert at the "Guacheros Club" in Belgrade.



Who was St. Valentine? There were three! The most likely was a martyr put to death for conducting marriages among Roman legionnaires, who had been instructed not to marry. It has an interesting history, as a celebration. Our friend Chaucer features.

Speaking of Chaucer, and without meaning to rekindle the previous discussion, I did run across another description of the female lead in one of his tales that might better suit some of you who objected the last time. It is of Griselda, from the Cleric's Tale:

Amongst these humble folk there dwelt a man
Who was considered poorest of them all;
But the High God of Heaven sometimes can
Send His grace to a little ox's stall;
Janicula men did this poor man call.
A daughter had he, fair enough to sight;
Griselda was this young maid's name, the bright.

If one should speak of virtuous beauty,
Then was she of the fairest under sun;
Since fostered in dire poverty was she,
No luxurious in her heart had run;
More often from the well than from the tun
She drank, and since she would chaste virtue please,
She knew work well, but knew not idle ease.

But though this maiden tender was of age,
Yet in the breast of her virginity
There was enclosed a ripe and grave courage;
And in great reverence and charity
Her poor old father fed and fostered she;
A few sheep grazing in a field she kept,
For she would not be idle till she slept.

And when she homeward came, why she would bring
Roots and green herbs, full many times and oft,
The which she'd shred and boil for her living,
And made her bed a hard one and not soft;
Her father kept she in their humble croft
With what obedience and diligence
A child may do for father's reverence.

Upon Griselda, humble daughter pure,
The marquis oft had looked in passing by,
As he a-hunting rode at adventure;
And when it chanced that her he did espy,
Not with the glances of a wanton eye
He gazed at her, but all in sober guise,
And pondered on her deeply in this wise:

Commending to his heart her womanhood,
And virtue passing that of any wight,
Of so young age in face and habitude.
For though the people have no deep insight
In virtue, he considered all aright
Her goodness, and decided that he would
Wed only her, if ever wed he should.

Unfortunately, the rest of the tale is nearly unbearable -- certainly to those who love truly. Still, I thought perhaps you would appreciate this much of it: a girl, though poor and only 'fair enough to sight,' but the fairest under the sun inside her heart.

Strong Men Armed.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2010 - U.S. forces in the Marja region of Afghanistan are engaged in a series of missions to prime the Taliban stronghold before a massive assault that's expected soon, defense officials said today.
Some 12,000 U.S. and NATO troops and 3,000 Afghan forces are expected to be involved once the larger-scale operation begins in earnest. Officials declined to reveal when the assault would start, saying only that it is expected to commence soon.

Good luck and God Speed.