Happy Thanksgiving

The Wall Street Journal has run And the Fair Land and The Desolate Wilderness every Thanksgiving since 1961. I implore all to pick up a Journal on this day and read. In closing the latter, we recognize a slight similarity between the account of the Plymouth Colonists in 1620 and American conservatives on Thanksgiving, c. 2008:

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Derrida and the Absence of Authority

Today we will present you with a bit of Ennobler history: the title of this page appeared first in the authors’ discourse in gerund form. One day in August, the debate over what is and is not “ennobling” with respect to high and popular cultures gained far more momentum among us than it really deserved. Jeremiah said “ennobling” tens of times (in the course of two or more sentences), Jason claimed that he’d never heard the word “ennobling” so frequently in so few verbal feet, and here we are as an indirect result.

The value of popular culture may or may not be discussed here again (though I’m afraid I may be playing the role of Epimetheus for mentioning it). What is interesting, however, is the way our academic discourse has mirrored the world-weariness evident in the most modern of popular culture outfits. Why is it that college philosophy students like Nietzsche so much? By my judgment it’s because he’s as clever and sarcastic and glib as they themselves hope to be. It is never about humanity anymore on television as much as it’s about an attempt to distance oneself from it, and so it goes in academic circles as higher educators find a way to feed to their students what it is they’ve been trained to value.

This is not about metaphysical systems and contrived philosophical discourse. It is rare to find a modern philosopher who writes to convince you of his metaphysical system the way Leibniz or Berkeley did; instead, they are content to create terms and words for others to use, the way Heidegger did. We are witnessing the continual collapse of the Grand Narrative, as Lyotard described it, and I’m not sure that it’s a categorical negative. But the result is certainly a lack of progress as such and an absence of authority that might serve to eliminate a large degree of richness in the philosophical traditions to come.

If our philosophical cravings don’t model Nietzsche, they probably mirror Derrida. Popular interpretations of Derrida hold that ultimate philosophical truth is un-attainable, non-existent or uninteresting. It is the third that is most pernicious: whether or not there are metaphysical truths we can know through reason is an open question (and it might serve undergraduate philosophy students to admit that maybe they themselves haven't quite developed the faculties to know those truths), but it is the fallback of the ‘clever and sarcastic and glib’ community to subordinate philosophy as a whole to a literary exercise wherein they are required to do no more than deconstruct. As we know from watching liberals the past eight years, it’s much easier to tear down a theoretical structure than build one, and perhaps a whole lot more fun.

Derrida sought to turn philosophy into a historical conversation of constant interpretation and re-interpretation. Why is this? Well, if there’s no truth to be had, the only place we can go is backwards. The problem with this pattern is not the principle itself, but the effect. You do not need to be very learned to make fun of writings the way Derrida has. The more this suits one’s purpose as a scholar, the more undercutting takes the floor as the dominant mental exercise of those who read to generate commentary.

I am not arguing that Derrida is useless, just that too many young academics are like him. Deconstruction is not without value, but it is not much of a goal, really. With it, we risk a failure to appreciate the philosophical giants, especially the ones that the ‘clever and sarcastic and glib’ would call outdated (like Aquinas or Aristotle, who are just pathetic in their treatment of current issues like feminism and atheism). There is a place for analytics and textual criticism in philosophy (Jeremiah may disagree), but there is also a need for the beautiful cathedrals of thought that people like Spinoza built for us to consider. Here’s to the idea that we can reclaim an appreciation for the great thinker, no matter how large or small his system, nor how inviting his work is for the less-ennobling comedies within us.

Happy Birthday Mr. Nozick

Robert Nozick was born on November 16, 1938. He died in 2002 after a long struggle with stomach cancer. He would have been 70 today.

Perhaps we will get around to addressing his politics, epistemology or analytics on this page. Certainly the intellectual weight of Nozick's and Rawls's philosophies in higher academia (an environment that, sadly, chooses the latter over the former without much hesitation) recommends it. For now, those of us at The Ennobler would like to wish Mr. Nozick a happy birthday.

Celebrate with us and read some Nozick.

"What Does the GOP Do Next?"

Just like we did before the election, we will post links from a special editorial series from The Wall Street Journal. Here, GOP leaders attempt to determine the path best traveled in the years to come:

Take Some Political Risks (Paul Ryan)

Diversity Is Destiny (Danny Vargas)

Stay Faithful to Core Values (Richard Land)

Listen. Adapt. Be Positive. (Michael Steele)

What Would Reagan Do? (Henry Olsen)

Put California in Play (Peter Robinson)

Congratulations Mr. Obama

Jeremiah and I share many of the same concerns about the upcoming Obama presidency. Perhaps neither of us are among the many chosen people who are uplifted by his surprisingly dour rhetoric. I know neither of us are particularly excited about what kinds of policy options he will have the political capital to illustrate his widely-praised deliberative thoughtfulness over, what with the incorrigible Democratic Congress gaining strength right alongside him.

Regardless, this victory proves what the more optimistic among us have been saying this whole time: America has rapidly developed into a meritocracy wherein professionally arbitrary factors like race are of little impediment to personal success and opportunity. This is certainly not to be understated, for it is a fantastic thing. How long it has been this way is up for debate, but what is certain is that the sheer impossibility of an African-American president-elect is a living memory for my parents, and certainly for my grandparents. If Mr. Obama's election accelerates the wane of racial grievance ideology in America, well, at least we'll have one change we can truly believe in.

I did not support Mr. Obama's candidacy. In the way of full disclosure, I worked for his opposition. I expect to be highly critical of his policy in the future. But I would like to offer him my encouragement. The shallowness of President Bush's most fervent critics, the ones who would deny him the pleasure of calling himself their president, I hope will be moderated by conservatives who stand in thoughtful opposition of Mr. Obama's actions. The president of my country is my president, no matter what.

We do not need to throw Mr. Obama into Lake Michigan to know that he can't walk on water. We may know relatively little about how he will conduct himself in office, but of this much we should be sure. Let us hope that the better angels of Mr. Obama's nature guide him in his executive decisions over the next four or more years. He has my congratulations and fearful support.

Gaga in Grant Park

"Mark my words," I said last night, as the exuberant throng wept with joy across a vast expanse of Chicago's Grant Park. "This will end badly." Mark Steyn is back writing the back page for National Review after his trial in Canada and the Chris Buckley fiasco, and his first column is pretty good—and, as always, very timely. Well-adjusted citizens of a free society, he says, greet "whichever of their fellows would presume to lead them" with naught but "stilted cheers" and occasionally "widespread derision." In other words, the Bush-induced mass disillusionment has been generally bad for the country (not that it isn't immature and stupid), but Obama-mania has the potential to be much worse.

In the Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates describes how people become misanthropes: “Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards, he finds him to be wicked and unreliable…in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all. Have you not seen this happen?” (Grube trans., 89 d-e).

I was telling everyone who would listen last night that this whole experiment will end in one of two ways: either our president-elect will be completely, 100% successful in executing his agenda (a self-evidently disastrous proposition) or he won't. And because, in all likelihood, President Obama will have to make major compromises and significant sacrifices, those millions of people who made Harlem a haven of jubilation and Grant Park a sight to be seen will be more disillusioned than ever.

Of course, national misanthropy isn’t the greatest danger of mass adulation toward our leaders. Grant Park last night was indeed a sight to be seen, but it was a sight we had seen before—in a very skillful film by Leni Riefenstahl.

Dig In

That the man we have just chosen to be our forty-fourth president is to be the most radically pro-abortion chief executive in our nation’s history is not in question, and neither, really, is the fact that he is the most radical person from either side of the political spectrum ever to be elected. I, for one, can live with bad policy; I have for my entire life, those first five months aside. But my fears about the dawning administration go way beyond policy. I am scared because our new president-elect has the will and now the means not only to eliminate obstacles to his extraordinarily radical agenda, but also to eliminate conscientious dissent.

It has often been claimed that this administration will be a bipartisan one, devoted to changing the way we do things in Washington by reaching across the ideological divide. The president-elect himself has occasionally seemed aware that abortion is a difficult moral issue, conceding when Rick Warren asked him when life begins that “that question is above my pay grade” and, in a speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, noting that “There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice.” To this point, the man at the logo-adorned podium at least seems respectful of my right to disagree with him, to live my own beliefs. But then he continues the speech:

“When the real war is being fought abroad,” says the man we have just elected President of the United States, “they would have us fight culture wars here at home. I am absolutely convinced that culture wars are just so nineties. Their days are growing dark...We are tired of arguing about the same old stuff.”

This comment, perhaps more than any other, shows the true nature of the brand of bipartisanship our executive-to-be plans to exercise. Most people view bipartisan compromise as a struggle of thesis and antithesis, resulting eventually in a new synthesis. Our president-elect, however, channels Hegel not so much as Mussolini, who announced one day that his own powers of self-criticism were so great that there no longer needed to be any opposition parties in Italy. And lo, there were not. In three months, the most powerful man in the world will be a person tired of arguing about the same old stuff. And what that means is this: those abidingly inept people of goodwill are free to go about their bitter lives, but their days of calling the progressive agenda into question are over.

Never let it be said that the outgoing junior senator from Illinois does not back up his lofty rhetoric with concrete policy proposals. In response to a question after the Planned Parenthood speech, he promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would essentially declare abortion a fundamental right unalienable by anyone, of goodwill or otherwise. According to his answers to something called the “Reproductive Health Reality Check questionnaire,” he has the will—and now the means—to repeal the Hyde amendment, which does nothing to make abortion illegal, but guarantees that people of conscience will not have to pay for other people’s abortions with their federal tax dollars. His campaign’s response to the question “Does Sen. Obama support continuing federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers? Why or why not?” was a single word: “No.” Claiming that crisis pregnancy centers are a threat to legal abortion is a bit like attacking that Alcoholics Anonymous for subversively trying to bring back Prohibition, and yet the man who has promised to fund just about everything just can’t seem to bear the thought of a woman getting talked into bearing her child.

Toward what kind of America will be begin our journey on January 20? One clue might be found in New Mexico, where a photographer named Elaine Huguenin declined to be hired by a same-sex couple to take pictures of their “commitment ceremony.” The couple filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Division, and they won. Huguenin was assessed $6,600 in damages and barred from ever refusing such a request again. That is, this rather Orwellian extrajudicial body is so tolerant and respectful of diversity that they have compelled Elaine Huguenin to act in a way that contradicts her Christian beliefs.

There is no direct link to our next president here, but when we are speaking of matters judicial and Constitutional, we have to keep in mind the most famous of all the passages from that Planned Parenthood speech: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." Eventually, anywhere from two to as many as five justices of the United States Supreme Court will have been nominated by a former constitutional law professor who values empathy over wisdom, courage, restraint, impartiality, experience, knowledge of the law and grammar itself (“criteria” is plural). Indeed, the evaluation of any quality other than empathy in a potential justice is doubtless above our next president’s pay grade, and anyway, the choice between a gay couple’s feelings and Elaine Huguenin’s constitutional rights is an easy one when one is sick of arguing about the same old stuff. A conscience still fighting the culture wars is no conscience at all, says the man who will throw out the first pitch of the next baseball season; until then, I’ll be digging in to that batter’s box.

The Economist Endorses Obama

This week's issue of The Economist includes a much-anticipated endorsement of presidential candidate Barack Obama. The Economist is a publication that most of us owe a great deal to for helping shape our politics in a classically liberal fashion in our most formative intellectual years. It is out of respect that we respond.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

I suppose it might be a self-acknowledged stretch for the magazine to use the phrase "wholeheartedly" here, as they proceed to enumerate a number of significant caveats. A theme running through this response will be that the magazine is casting aside many of its deeply-held principles in making this endorsement. Paying lip service to Obama's "inexperience," "lack of clarity" and "the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress" is a clear example.

The endorsement succinctly discusses the long-term challenges our next president will face. The distinction it makes between the two candidates is the marginalization of "the real John McCain" and "the compelling and detailed portrait" of Barack Obama. If the endorsement is about how well each campaign was run, perhaps the magazine is right to support the Democrat. However, the magazine's editorial stance almost always comes down to policy. So is there too little substantial difference between them (in which case the 'transformational' factors of each candidate is the tiebreaker), or is the magazine flying by the seat of its pants?

If The Economist doesn't like the 'fake' John McCain, well, that's fine to a point. Some of us are less inclined to read the 'fake' Economist, where the candidate who better represents the magazine's trade, spending, entitlements, energy, regulatory, education and Iraq policies loses out to the other candidate's 'coolness.'

It appears that The Economist is more willing to bet that the less-appealing rhetoric that John McCain has displayed throughout the campaign is a better indicator of his future in office than Barack Obama's. But it is not clear that the relevance of McCain's embrasure of the "theocratic culture wars" matches up to Obama's pledge to, say, re-negotiate NAFTA. And if a portion of all of this is rhetoric and a portion is promise, The Economist doesn't really attempt to distinguish between the two. Perhaps the best way is to look at experience, an area in which the magazine already admitted Obama is lacking.

Alas, we eventually get to the heart of the matter:

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

Once upon a time The Economist's definition of "governing well" included beneficial public policy.

On Obama's thin resume, the magazine points out that he possesses the right management skills regardless. Surely he is a thoughtful, intelligent and capable man. It's the response to the second point that seems to shine some light on what this endorsement is all about. The Economist is impressed that in the heat of the campaign, Mr. Obama moved (however slightly) to the center, while Mr. McCain moved (however slightly) to the right.

This is the kind of stuff that the magazine would ordinarily dismiss as "electioneering." This is what people do when they run for office. They pivot in various directions as a result of various electoral conditions. Whether or not each candidate moved one way at some point is not nearly as important as where they are or or where they might go next. At least with McCain we know where he's governed from for the past twenty years. And we know that Obama is far more compatible with a Democratic Congress that The Economist has been quick to criticize. Surely the magazine will be disappointed when the next pivot results in a bundle of new agricultural subsidies, or vastly increased Medicare spending, or an irresponsible timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfill his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

I never thought that The Economist, of all things, might deserve an Obama presidency too.