On Wallace's Jest: Introduction to Language-Games

I have decided to commence on a pseudo-project involving the deconstruction of a few themes in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The novel is not just a work-of-genius in the most sincere sense of the term, but it happens to be my favorite work of fiction, and is an important piece of literature in its own right: it attempts to redefine what the novel and author can and should do in the wake of postmodernism’s moral decadence.

Wallace admitted to being heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein’s influential concept of language-games. The classic example (here, of "builder’s language") can be found in his Philosophical Investigations:

"The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learned to bring at such-and-such a call."

The builder can use the word "block" because his language-game allows for the possibility of the other words. A language instantiates the logical combinations of all its elements according to a specific set of grammatical rules. These combinations are the boundary of the builder’s understanding (hence the famous quotation, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"). If the language does not permit the expression of a thought because there is no grammar for it, then we cannot, as participators in that language-game, possibly conceive of that thought.

Thus, there is no metaphysics. For Wittgenstein, language is the world, and the language-games we participate in are constructed in such a way that cannot penetrate the world through accurate description. Interestingly, we must look to language in order to find the structures of our worlds (Wittgenstein always thought philosophy was a descriptive task, not a cutting-away of layers to find meaning in things that were not in front of the philosopher the entire time), but we can never know it as a result. Wittgenstein could show us how language produced metaphysical contours, but not actual things themselves. Value and meaning are evident in language, but not described by it; thus, we act and speak ethically (through the language-game), forever failing to systematize ethics (or metaphysics).

This is why, in his Investigations, he made his most profound move: Wittgenstein threw his early methodology out the window. The language-game contoured all individual meaning. What language could not describe, the philosopher could not know. Then, to come into dialogue with the traditional philosophical questions (even if to reject them), we must forget the analytic method:

"Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and to answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads philosophers into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive.’"

Next time I will discuss Infinite Jest’s treatment of the notion of freedom in America as a way of critically considering libertarianism as philosophy in light of its adoption of a particular language-game.

The Other PT

Here's a neat little article on a good friend of The Ennobler. Read through and you'll find out that Peter Toshev, an Essex High School graduate, biker gang member, and downright plain person, will be working this summer at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. While astrophysics and advanced mathematics are not The Ennobler's area of expertise, there is no denying the unequivocal search for truth by Mr. Toshev and all the scientists at CERN.

Congratulations Peter! I'll see you in Geneva this summer.

The Daily Heideggerian

“He’s baaaack!” No, I’m not referring to PT; we’re as in the dark about his return as you are (all two of you, as a result of yet another unacceptable hiatus on our part). But be sure to welcome, again, Martin Heidegger. As a result of February’s rapid-fire account of fundamentally ontological applications of his work, Jeremiah suggested that we change our name to The Daily Heideggerian. For now we’ll continue slowly on that path, though if Congress forces us to relinquish our naming rights, we at least have a backup plan.

The G-20 is winding things down in London after a couple days of annoying, though at this point common, announcements of pressing agendas. Mostly, it was a series of derivations on the same question: how does the free world respond to the failures of capitalism? Despite conservatives’ (real conservatives, Mr. Sarkozy) all-too-easy repudiation of the general question as misleading and factually wrong (I, for one, find it conceptually confusing that “housing market” and “capitalism” mean the same thing now), there were more institutional proposals offered yesterday than post-less Wednesdays the past two months (we need you, PT).

Heidegger is, of course, concerned with Dasein (like a human being, but stripped of everything save his ontological status), as well as Dasein’s concern (we are always entangled with the world, taking care of and concerning ourselves with “things”). Part of the fundamental ontology involves the concept of “being-with,” or Dasein’s relationship with and visibility of the “they” (das Man):

By “Others” we do not mean everyone else but me – those over against whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself – those among whom one is too (Heidegger, Being and Time).

There is a sense that we are ontologically intimate with others, and “being-with” is the action that describes it. There is a lot that Heidegger says about authenticity (there is a lot that any existentialist says about authenticity; see Sartre, Jean-Paul), and this is a big one: how is it that we behave authentically toward other Dasein?

There are, in fact, two kinds of concern: leaping in and leaping ahead. To leap in is to take the other’s “care” away from him – one can find another hammering on a shoe and take both the hammer and the shoe away from him, cobbling until completion and handing him back a finished shoe. Leaping in is concerning oneself with removing the concern from others, disburdening them of their own projects (whether in totality or in measure). There is a creation of dependence in this relation, which is inauthentic. It is the most prevalent form of concern there is.

To leap ahead gives care back to the other: Mit-dasein are allowed to do things for themselves. In a sense, we can help make this so by freeing the other for his care in transparency. This opens up their possibilities of being, allows them to exist in a more authentic manner, and represents an authentic form of concern for Dasein himself.

What does this have to do with G-20? I think you can figure that out on your own.

A Whimsical Fancy

What if the tastes of the drinking public turned to Thomism? Would beer companies start using the Angelic Doctor as a pitchman? With apologies to my esteemed colleague's brainchild the "BL Smoothman", the following is what I imagine we might see plastered all over the country to encourage plain persons to drink Miller Lite:


Spuds McKenzie, eat your little canine heart out.

Restore the "Pinafore"

“Here’s a How-De-Do!” I have recently come to the unwelcome realization that we may be on the brink of losing one of our great cultural and comedic treasures: the hilarious operas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Our own generation, it would seem, has been largely deprived of these delightful collaborations, composed in England from the 1870s through the Gay Nineties. I myself have only the most fleeting familiarity with the duo’s work, but “When I Was a Lad”, my parents took me to see “The Mikado”, and I honestly may not have laughed as hard before or since. But “Never Mind the Why and the Wherefore”, it is high time to “let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime” that is the forgetfulness of our age. If you are turned off by the word “opera” and dates beginning in a numbers lower than 19, “Behold the Lord High Executioner!” of your modernist prejudices. The centerpiece of the Gilbert & Sullivan genius is the “patter song,” which is sort of like rap music, but with singing, diction and actual words. Check out some of these gems on YouTube, or rent the wonderful 1983 film adaptation of “The Pirates of Penzance” with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, and I suspect you will rapidly become hooked. You might not know it yet, but your liberal arts education has equipped you well to be “the very model of a modern Major-General.”

The Ennobler Office Pool

We at the Ennobler would like to invite all of our dear readers on Facebook to join our just-for-fun NCAA pool. Sure, Zach Tavlin can give a nice appraisal of the Middle East conflict or an insider's look at the U.S. Congress, but how many of the Sweet 16 can he get right? Can college basketball star Jason Weischedel use his firsthand knowledge of the game to defeat meddlers who dare to sully the sport with statistical inquiry? And how will I decide whether Boston College, Marquette, Xavier, Gonzaga or Villanova should win it all? Just go on Facebook and search for "The Ennobler Office Pool", or just tell me and I'll invite you.

And if anyone wants to fill out an NIT bracket, I'd be happy to score that as well.

Oh Dirtmaier where art thou?

Its been far too long since I've talked to my good (and great) friend. While I may not have anything important to say (since I was born post-Aquinas), a heart-felt discussion on natural law, college basketball, nude modeling, or Tim Root would be much appreciated. If needs be, we could resort to writing telegrams, since using cellphones might make us fall into the deep wilderness of gadgets.

Capacity for generosity

In a recent post, my colleague asked, "Do you know who is actually generous?"

Apparently it's not the philanthropic foundations that are "eschewing the needs of the most vulnerable in our society." I suppose the only appropriate way to give is through the Singer Solution to World Poverty.

Confession and the Reality of Sin

Over the centuries, people have gone to some extraordinary lengths to escape to Sacrament of Reconciliation. Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées that “The Catholic religion does not bind us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it allows them to remain hidden from all other men save one…and she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, which makes this knowledge to him as if it were not.” In Pascal’s view, the sacrament is hardly a thing to be feared or avoided: “Can we imagine anything more charitable and pleasant?” he asks rhetorically. “And yet,” he continues, “the corruption of man is such that he finds even this law harsh; and it is one of the main reasons which has caused a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church.” In other words, our fallen human nature includes an aversion to confession strong enough to coalesce into the Protestant Reformation.

Now, there were clearly other factors at work during the great schism of the 16th century—there were, after all, 95 theses, not all of which had to do with confession. And yet, Pascal’s point holds: there was, and remains, a strong reluctance in the human heart to confess one’s sins, even to someone bound by sacred oath not to pass them along. Many believing Catholics take a sudden detour to the metaphorical cafeteria on the confession question, unilaterally declaring it by word or deed an “optional” component of the practice of their faith. People within and outside the Church often prefer to rely on God’s mercy in a very general way for forgiveness, to pin everything on a single and allegedly lasting salvation experience, or to confess their sins “directly” to God through prayer. For almost everyone, going to confession is a mighty struggle, and it seems we try to avoid it through any means we can invent.

Whether caused by this atavistic aversion to the confessional or not, the tendency toward do-it-yourself morality and repentance has culminated in a massive loss of belief in sin itself. In one prevailing scheme, “sin” is dismissed as a quaint concept, an outmoded way to describe things about which we have guilt-inducing hang-ups; in another, the individual culpability implied by sin is shifted to circumstances and institutions, creating a culture of universal victimhood. It often appears that fewer people today believe in the existence of sin than believe in the existence of God. When I glance hastily at the world or into my own heart, the latter proposition seems intuitively like a much tougher sell; it doesn’t take St. Thomas Aquinas to reason back to sin from its effects here below. The modern mood is one of an extraordinary unwillingness to recognize the hitherto unquestionable fact of human sinfulness.

It is true that we are living in a world in which it is extremely difficult to commit a freely willed act. The fragmentation of the soul by modern psychology, the commercial incentives to fevered acquisitiveness and the enslavement of the will by addictions of all kinds have transformed us from actors into patients, in both the etymological and the (rehab) clinical sense. But the dominant tendency is to chalk everything up to unwilled compulsion. Even one of the most obvious and appalling sins cast before our jaded eyes, the rape of children by certain priests, has been largely blamed on the custom of priestly celibacy. The sinners become victims, and the sins of those in the institution who allowed these atrocities to occur and continue become confused and muddled amidst the culpability imputed to the institutional Church itself. The net result is that the culture of victimhood persists, the existence of sin remains unrecognized, and there arises yet another excuse not to go to confession.

I am neither a priest nor a theologian, nor am I any other kind of religious or cultural authority. I have no qualifications whatsoever to write on this topic, except this one: I don’t like to go to confession, either. It is painful to make an examination of conscience, reflecting in detail about my own bad acts. It is nerve-wracking to sit and wait outside the confessional, clutching a list of my transgressions. It is embarrassing to tell the priest what I’ve done wrong. I do not like to go to confession. But a wise priest once told me something I never forgot: “I don’t like going into confession, either,” he said, “but I sure do like walking out.”

When Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton was asked why he joined the Church he replied simply, "To get rid of my sins." Not to suppress them, not to wallow in them, not to work though his hang-ups and guilt on his own, and not to deny their existence, but to get rid of them; to receive absolution from a man who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ Himself. One need not follow Chesterton all the way into the Roman Church, however, to come to grips with the omnipresent reality of sin. For those of you who are not Catholic, please remember that sin is a decidedly ecumenical phenomenon, and do not allow yourselves to fall into the pernicious traps of modernity. For my Catholic readers, I urge you to make at least one confession during this season of Lent. Rescue yourself from the ethical and metaphysical pudding of passivity, and admit out loud you do act, you do choose, and that sometimes you choose wrongly by speaking in the active voice: “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

Generosity Without Capacity

As someone who takes phone calls from angry constituents on a regular basis, I’ve learned that Republicans fall into one of two categories: they’re either ignorant or soulless. Lately, it’s been more of the latter. In Congress, a few of my office’s constituents say, Republicans care more about the “party line” than struggling homeowners or the unemployed. For them, the series of opposition no-votes on the stimulus bill only proved that elected officials routinely fail to return the generosity that the voting public bestowed upon them when they put them into office in the first place.

Most human beings are sensitive, even Republicans. Unfortunately, we too often confuse concern or sensitivity with action. Conservatives like to warn about the dangers of good intentions. On the surface we’re saying that we often don't succeed in doing the good things we intend. But it also means that we often don't succeed in creating the capacity to do the things we should.

Consider the green-conscious liberals who nevertheless don’t have the time or means to participate in the programs the militant, college-dropout Greenpeace volunteers are peddling on street corners. “I would love to help, but I don’t have any money right now,” they’ll say, because they don’t want those dropouts, who are saving our planet and giving backrubs to poor African children, to think their hearts aren’t pure. But why is it that everyone is strapped in the first place? Perhaps if they had been more responsible with their money in the past (assuming they really do care more about the environment than math textbooks and marijuana) they could exhibit some much-needed generosity now. In all seriousness, if there is something worth devoting resources to, but you’ve squandered all you have on other things, good intentions are “about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.”

I do not think it’s possible to be generous with someone else’s property. It is not generous to steal somebody else’s money and give it to charity. It is not generous to tax someone, no matter what bracket he’s in, and give the resulting revenue to someone who failed to perform due diligence on his mortgage. It is not generous to let your friend cut in line; you must give up your spot entirely or else you’re just screwing everyone standing behind you.

Studies have shown that conservatives give a higher percentage of their income to charity, even if you account for the difference in church-based donations. Conservatives and liberals can both be generous. But when it comes to taxing and spending, generosity is really only relevant when it’s your own money in play. It does not take that good of a conscience to vote for increased healthcare spending when it’s funded by other people’s paychecks (and given the weak revenue projections on our President’s ‘soak-the-top-two-percent’ plan, most likely the paychecks of other people’s children as well).

Do you know who is actually generous? The person who pays off his debts and takes care of his children. Him doing so means that someone else doesn’t have to. The state doesn’t have to mop up his mistakes with other people’s money. Why we praise Democrats (or Republicans) who can’t keep a sustainable budget, diminishing government’s capacity to spend money responsibly without burdening the taxpayer and the economy, and not the people who advocate and practice responsibility and accountability I'll never understand.

Being generous to others is a good thing. And while intentions can be good, intention without capacity is worthless. If you want to be good, be effective. In the meantime, when calling your congressman's office, take it easy on the swears.

Trading in trays for a day

Yesterday, Carleton College decided to remove all lunch trays from its dining halls. In an effort to minimize costs and improve sustainability, Carleton declared a weekly “trayless Friday.” This seemingly uncontroversial move was met with a surprising amount of backlash. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the means associated with “trayless Friday,” the ends are justifiable.

The reasoning behind my support of going “trayless” is purely an economic one. As Stephen Dubner notes, “people buy less food and subsequently eat less and throw away less.” This should be no surprise considering students can’t fill up multiple plates since they can’t hold much more than one. At the same time, there are downfalls. First, it’s inconvenient. Kids want to grab as much food as they can as quickly as possible. While I have no way of knowing how much utility each student gains from eating off a tray each meal, it would be hard to convince me that the extra utility gained from trays outweighs the money saved from getting rid of them. Plus, if kids really want trays, I’m sure they could be sold on a per meal basis at the entrance or rented out for the term. Second, there is plenty of food wasted that doesn't even make it to the trays of students. As a student worker in the dining hall last year, I got to witness this first hand. At the end of the night, I would often find myself dumping trays of cookies or crocks of soup that hadn't yet been served. I was appalled and disgusted by the excessive waste. But instead of providing a reason to oppose trays, this simply shows the need for the dining services to more efficiently allocate resources. Third, kids complain that we’re “stuffing the pockets of large, unethical corporations.” But this doesn’t mean that those corporations shouldn’t be looking for ways to cut their costs, nor does it mean that Carleton students can’t receive some of the money saved back in their pockets.

The latter objection actually hints at a larger, more complicated issue: the make-up of Carleton’s dining contract. I have adamantly opposed the dining structure at Carleton due to the fact that in no way does it resemble a free market. There is little incentive to provide grade-A food at low prices. Bon Appetit essentially has monopoly power over students who live on campus. I do not have the expertise on the structure of Carleton’s contract to make a sound, positive economic analysis, but it is pretty obvious that the Carleton’s dining services are quite flawed.

It is highly possible that, without proper incentives, going "trayless" is a bad idea, particularly if it's limited to once a week. But in the long run, Carleton should seriously consider going trayless for good. Doing so would provide Carleton an opportunity to reduce waste and, more importantly, lower costs.

The Last Remaining Clinton Supporter

In his speech on Tuesday night, President Obama explained that our current economic difficulties resulted when “regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.” Most likely he’s trying to paint his predecessor as the gutter, even though President Bush spent a significant amount of energy pushing Fannie and Freddie oversight initiatives to no avail (thanks to Messrs. Frank and Dodd in Congress). Really, if one looks, Obama’s idea of the nefarious deregulatory regime was President Clinton’s, along with his aide Larry Summers who served as Treasury Secretary.

The Clinton administration succeeded in its attempt to deregulate the banking industry with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. Repealing Glass-Steagall, it opened up competition among banks, securities firms and insurance companies. Despite Mr. Obama’s overtones, it was a good bill; one simply can’t imagine the difficulty Bank of America would have had acquiring Merrill Lynch without it. The larger point is that, in light of the troubling start to our current President’s term and the content of his speech on Tuesday, conservatives’ hopes for the better aspects of the last Democratic president’s record to shine through over the next four to eight years have already started to dim.

As fascinating as it is to say this, I was always something of a Bill Clinton fan. He pushed free trade, NATO expansion, welfare reform and (a lot of the time) smaller government. He was possibly better on trade than either Bush, and while Clinton gets far too much credit for the economic prosperity of the decade (“I don’t know if I can give the private sector THAT much credit…maybe I could give them half that?”), free trade played an important part. As easy as it’s been for media types to throw around Depression-related bilge to strike a chord, we need only look at the facts to determine that closing up international trade links during a recession can only hurt our medium and long-term recovery prospects.

NATO expansion is not much of an issue anymore, but it represented the more responsible aspects of Clinton’s foreign policy. Perhaps Mr. Obama can carve out his own niche by following through on Central European missile defense. Clinton’s welfare reform was the most significant and successful social policy reform of a generation. Affecting incentives the wrong way this time around when dealing with the struggling housing market would be an enormous step back. And whether or not Mr. Clinton truly believed in it, it’s remarkable to think of a Democrat simply telling us that limited government, as a matter of philosophy, is a respectable answer.

One of our readers and former high school classmates argued throughout the campaign season that Obama’s anti-trade, big government rhetoric was mere posturing. Excuse me if we were uncomfortable with the idea of relying upon a candidate’s dishonesty for our economic salvation. The same goes for Iraq, security and comprehensive tax policy. If Bill Clinton was a moderate who sometimes talked like a liberal, I’m afraid that Obama and his advisors are liberals talking like moderates. And then sometimes, like on Tuesday, Obama talks like a liberal. That’s okay if it’s a lie, as long as the markets don’t react too poorly to diminished future expectations.

Given the recent stimulus bill and the mortgage cram down legislation working its way through Congress, how soon can we realistically expect those things we actually liked about the Clinton years to make their way back into the Democratic fold?

When is a Jesuit not a Jesuit?

Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., the president of Boston College, recently caused quite a stir by ordering the placement of crucifixes or other religious symbols in all 151 classrooms on the school’s Chestnut Hill, MA campus. This marked the completion of an eight-year campaign to reclaim visibly the university’s Catholic identity. If the Boston Globe’s account is to be believed, the students were happy or indifferent for the most part, but many of the lay faculty were irate. As can only be expected in this region and this epoch (O tempora, O mores!), protests immediately flared up both within the BC community and from outside observers. The iconoclastic (in the original, etymological sense) arguments put forth by the dissenters fell into three main categories, each of which I will attempt to elucidate and address.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that one of The Ennobler’s most faithful readers (and unquestionably its finest and most prolific commentator) is, mirabile dictu, a Jew in the Boston College Class of 2011. I have no doubt that he will have some cogent thoughts on this issue (and perhaps some inside information), but in the meantime he serves to put a human face on the first argument against the increased presence of Catholic images. As Jewish biology professor Dan Kirschner told the Boston Herald, “There is no choice if you don’t think it’s appropriate….I think it is being insensitive to the people of other faith traditions here.” I wish to be as charitable as the circumstances and my constitution allow, so I will not impute to Dr. Kirchner the sentiment that Boston College, a private institution which has been openly and explicitly affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church since its inception nearly a century and a half ago, does not have an unassailable legal right to express its mission in visible form. Rather, his complaint (the prevalence of which on the BC campus I am eager to learn) is that the crucifixes make Jews, Muslims and non-Christians (perhaps even non-Catholics, since I understand each cross includes a corpus) feel belittled and marginalized.

The trouble here is that, once again, it is a simple fact that Boston College is a Catholic school. Everyone knew this when they enrolled or accepted a position at the institution, and everyone understood that this fact implied at least a slight risk of encountering some signs of Catholicism (for example, on my own campus about 60% of the people on campus are walking around this evening with ashes on their foreheads. It happens). Perhaps more importantly, at many of our nation’s venerable Catholic (read here: Jesuit) institutions, it is the orthodox Catholic students who feel belittled and marginalized, demoralized by the culture of flagrant permissiveness and politically correct disloyalty to the Magisterium. Georgetown is the worst in this regard, but for many years Boston College has been very much in the mix of Romanist schools gone decadent. Before we worry about ruffling the feathers of non-Catholics who chose to come to Catholic institutions by displaying Catholic symbols, let’s make sure Catholic students feel at home in their own native habitats.

The second argument stems from the omnipresent obsession among academics with the Baal of “academic freedom”. Dr. Maxim Shrayer, who chairs the department of Slavic and Eastern languages, told the Globe that Fr. Leahy’s move is “contrary to the letter and spirit of open intellectual discourse that makes education worthwhile and distinguishes first-rate universities from mediocre and provincial ones.” Leaving aside the fact that the very concept of a “first-rate university” was invented in Europe by the Catholic Church, this statement makes very little sense. It seems to translate to something along the lines of “people in a college community have the unalienable right to say and express absolutely anything they wish, unless they want to hang a crucifix in a science lab or erect a statue of St. Ignatius Loyola.” Dr. Shrayer, who apparently resents the incursion of Sts. Cyril and Methodius into his ancestral lands, dubiously identifies “first-rate universities” with “secular universities”, and seems to believe that a figurine on two sticks on his classroom wall inhibits his intellectual discourse more than the fact that his paychecks are signed by Fr. William Leahy, S.J.

The third argument comes in the form of an even more mind-boggling comment from BC sophomore and noted Church historian Alex Loverde (I hope you don’t know this guy, Sam!) who helpfully informed the Herald that “I think the Jesuit tradition is more of openness and tolerance,” and bafflingly opined that “an overt display of crucifixes is not what the Jesuits would have had in mind.” Actually, there’s no need to speculate; the Jesuits, at long last, do indeed have visible orthodoxy in mind. What Loverde seems to mean by “Jesuits” is not the real, live priests of the Society of Jesus who actually run Boston College, but the Jesuits in the bad old days of the 1960’s, when the Berrigan brothers interpreted Gospel imperatives as exhortations to mild domestic terrorism and “social justice” and the “Spirit of Vatican II” hung hazily in the air. Mr. Loverde can hardly be blamed for feeling there’s some sort of a bait-and-switch afoot; the nebulous “Jesuit tradition” has become such a trope in Catholic education—advertised and customized beyond recognition by the Jesuits themselves—that I have heard more than one person insist seriously that, “No, no, BC isn’t a Catholic school, it’s Jesuit.” Well, it has taken many years, and there is still much work to be done, but thanks to Fr. Leahy and people like him, Boston College is both once again.

Your move, Samuel.

Friar Fanatic

Fellow Ennobler Jeremiah Begley storms the court after Providence's stunning victory over #1 ranked Pitt on Senior Night. The win, one of the biggest in program history, keeps PC's postseason hopes alive. With luck, the entire Ennobler staff will join Jeremiah in celebration at the Dunkin Donuts Center next winter for the first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament.

Congratulations Matt Lasko

Well done sir.

Bravo Battier

Here's a gem on one of the most under-appreciated athletes in all of sports, Shane Battier. As a die-hard Duke fan and a moderately devoted Houston Rockets follower, I've had the fortune of cheering on Battier for almost twelve years now, seven of which he's spent on the aforementioned teams.

At Duke, Battier was one of the best college basketball players of the modern era. His individual accolades were superb: he won Defensive player of the year three times, was the 2001 player of the year, and was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary men's basketball team. While his individual awards and statistics were impressive, they pale in comparison with his team's successes. Battier played on two of the best college basketball teams ever, the 1999 and 2001 Blue Devils, reached the NCAA championship game both those years, won the 2001 National championship, and tied the all-time record with 131 wins. Not too shabby.

While it would most certainly be a stretch to consider Battier's pro career as successful as his amateur one, there's no denying his importance to the teams he's been on. As his career statline (10.1 ppg, 4.8 rpg, 1.0 bpg) would suggest, Battier's impact doesn't typically show up in the boxscore. But clearly, as the excerpt below indicates, he has a significant impact on what's really important: the standings.

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court... A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.

It's not too often you hear Battier's name thrown around with perrenial all-stars and MVPs, but it's nice to see him finally get some of the press he deserves.

Disorder in Free Jazz

A friend of The Ennobler and I had a chance to see Ornette Coleman in concert this summer. It was an exciting prospect for two huge jazz fans aware of the legendry and prominence of one of the founders of modern free jazz. It was the bewilderment and confusion on our faces as we left Burlington’s Flynn Theater that was the most remarkable event of the evening. “I’m not sure I ever liked his albums that much anyway,” my companion said.

For the less jazz-inclined amongst us, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come has long been considered, as critic Steve Huey put it, “a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with.” Coleman’s style is more or less shared with Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, late Coltrane and many others who attempted to break free of the constraints of “harder jazz” approaches like bebop. But it’s those constraints and limitations, I feel, that are the essence of music’s connection to ordered existence. As a matter of philosophy, free jazz falls disappointingly short.

I am not inclined to argue against that which moves the listener, for who can discredit phenomenal sensations themselves, no matter how primitive in structure? But comparison is still in order: bebop, an approach that utilizes pace and improvisation just like free jazz does, is based strongly on harmonic structure. It is considered avant-garde to completely discard fixed chord changes and standard time. Modal jazz does not use chord progressions as its harmony, but an ordered series of intervals that help to define the pitch. It is considered avant-garde to break even these loosest of conventions.

Whether we are serious about art or, as the artistic nihilists among us maintain, “we just want to be entertained,” we are constantly making connections between what is represented to us through our senses and what we hold to be meaningful externally. We are attracted to symmetry and balance in most things, and the musical artist or group that can imitate an order that coheres with our phenomenal perspective, structuring complex schemes so that we can recognize some aspect of ourselves within them, should be most appreciated. The night before, the two of us had seen The Dave Brubeck Quartet play around with time signatures and syncopate measures and do so in a more humble and refined way. It didn’t force one’s intellect to pull and strain at itself to gain a slice of the intentionally ugly fatalism Coleman’s music was selling.

Before I give off the impression that I’m writing out of a dislike for Coleman (and less specifically, any other free jazz artists I’ve come across), he has had a wonderful career composing minor jazz standards, performing well into old age and becoming a respectable elder statesman, performing and recording with a wide number of young players. It is a dislike for the radically non-conservative jazz, where there is no unity in accompaniment, no restraint in improvisation, no structure in harmony and little humility in the artist himself.

Text Time

Today, I finally succumbed to all the peer pressure that had been mounting for years. After trying to hang on to my social sovereignty, I finally have a text messaging plan. In reality, it was my father who, for financial reasons (at least I assume), realized that unlimited text messaging for the family is indeed in the family's own self-interest. While it certainly took a while to give into this fad, I had two reasons for my pro-talk stance, both relatively simple:

1. I'm cheap, and texting costs money.
2. A phone is not a computer, it's a telephone, over which two or more people are meant to hold a verbal conversation.

I soon found out that not everyone held these same beliefs. In high school, plenty of my friends would text, but not too often. Once I reached college, however, I found out that texting is an intrinsic part of the social scene in itself. I found myself sacrificing a social life in pursuit of saving 10 or 20 cents a week. Eventually, the opportunity cost of not texting outweighed that of texting, and here I am today. Unlimited texts, any time verizon to verizon. I assume I won't exceed my 500 non-Verizon texts per month, but I'll have to see.

I would argue that text-messaging is a general "good," (probably not a particularly ennobling characteristic, though a fellow ennobler is a texting virtuoso) but despite the alarming capabilities that texting allows, it does have its downfalls. First, its awfully difficult to express one's feelings in two or three poorly written sentences. Second, texting can often change what would be a 15 second phone call into a difficult exchange leaving both parties confused. Finally, text-messaging is yet another tool among the "wilderness of gadgets" that my colleague discussed recently. Texting does not feed "on the lowest impulses in our nature by appealing to our laziness and indulging our lusts, for violence in particular," but it does make me question our cultural values and norms, and shows how dependent we humans have become on technology.

That being said, feel free to text (or call) me whenever you'd like. Cheers.

Getting it Right Moving Forward

In the course of indulging what has become the principal preoccupation of his life, viz., the defamation and slander of former President George W. Bush and his compatriots in the erstwhile administration, earlier this week Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) proposed a “truth commission” to investigate wrongdoing by those individuals. The primary goal of such a commission would be, as the rather Orwellian name suggests, the exposition of “truth”: “I’m doing this not to humiliate people or punish people but to get the truth out,” claimed Leahy during a speech at Georgetown University. According to the AP story, the specific non-humiliating, non-punitive “truth” Leahy seeks must be found through an inquiry that will “reach far beyond looking for misdeeds at the Justice Department under Bush to include matters of Iraq prewar intelligence and the Defense Department.” In other words, just about everything about our former president’s execution of his presidential duties is fair game. Unconfirmed reports have Leahy traveling from the Georgetown campus to nearby Washington & Lee University, where he proceeded to exhume the remains of Robert E. Lee’s beloved horse Traveler and beat it with a stick.

One could explain this behavior in several ways. It may be that Leahy is sending a strong message to Bernie Sanders that he will not be denied the title of Most Petulant Senator from Vermont. It may be that the man from our intermittently endearing home state simply has nothing else to occupy his time in this post-Messianic age. But what is far more likely is that Leahy knows exactly how to ensure Democratic dominance for the foreseeable future: giving DailyKos its daily bread in the form of an inexhaustible and quotidian supply of Bush’s misdeeds. The recent success of the Party of Wilson is directly attributable to the rabble-rousing immanence of Bush, but their big gains have come at the expense of he-who-revs-up-Leftist-donors. Leahy’s attempt is to maintain the hatred in the absence of the man, and it just might work. Far from being a kook, Leahy is an incredibly shrewd political calculator.

There is at least one important person, however, who doesn’t think the commission such a good idea. President Barack Obama had not yet reviewed the plan in detail, but he did express the thought that “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.” He made a few other noncommittal remarks, all of which made it eminently clear that Leahy’s big idea is going nowhere with the new administration. Now, this is a marked departure from the rhetoric of the campaign trail, and it seems that President Obama is turning his back on the anti-Bush fanaticism which helped to catapult him into office. What gives?

For one thing, President Obama is showing genuine restraint and prudence here. Let it not be said that I imputed only avaricious motives to a man who is, at very least, comporting himself with a dignity worthy of the office, and a judiciousness admirable and increasingly rare (especially in the Vermont senatorial delegation). This explanation, however, is true but not exhaustive. The President simply cannot afford to have such a commission operating while he is trying to conduct a series of wars. My esteemed colleague wrote an excellent post last month about Obama’s substantive indistinguishability from Bush on national security issues. What we see here is a further manifestation of this same fact. Obama is tacitly admitting that many of the Bush administration’s policies were the correct ones, and while he repudiates them in public he sticks to them in the conduct of his presidential duties. A “truth commission” would highlight the similarities between the policies under review and the power currently in being. Seen in this light, Obama’s slightly puzzling comment on the Leahy proposal makes perfect sense: “let’s get it right moving forward.” In this case, “getting it right moving forward” means retaining the unpopular but effective policies of the President’s predecessor.

The Virtues of Memorization

One of my professors recently commented on his father’s ability to recite pages and pages of Shakespeare from memory, of which he’d learned sometime in childhood. He described the joy it brought his father to stake ownership to the text, to use it in embellishing and connecting to a moment. Doubtlessly, few in his class could relate. As beneficiaries of progressive education, most of us haven’t memorized a thing.

According to contemporary pedagogy, the idea of rote learning is a joke. It challenges much of what we’ve learned about teaching since the educational Stone Age. Of course, for my professor’s father’s generation, it wasn’t uncommon to memorize passages from Richard III, or Coleridge’s poetry, or Hamilton and Madison’s writings. Somewhere along the line we figured out how to make tools out of copper.

So it goes: there is little educative value to memorization, we’re told. It’s all online anyway, and who of the curious among us doesn’t recognize the advantages of having so much information at our fingertips? But there are distinct benefits to combining poetry and prose with memorization, regardless of the comparative advantages espoused by modern schooling. Cognitive broadening and a connection to the ideals of civilization are at stake.

At no point in Western history, since the value of education was established, have educators betrayed memorization and recitation as an intricate part of their tradition. In Athens, students would memorize Homer and portions of the epic cycle as a way of mastering their language and culture. Peter Brown described the importance of Virgil’s Aeneid to the later education of St. Augustine: “Every word, every turn of phrase was significant and the student saw this. The aim was to measure up to the timeless perfection of the ancient classic.”

One does not easily become a slave to the text, as many critics of memorization assert. It is usually to the contrary. When an epic or a poem transmits through us an appreciation of the passions of human life, we are freer in our pursuit of knowledge and the good. A young William Shakespeare, Michael Wood observed, “was the product of a memorizing culture in which huge chunks of literature were learned by heart. It offered him many rewards, not least a sense of poetry, rhythm and refinement—a heightened feel for language, as well as an abundance of tales and myths, imaginative resources that are among the most exciting gifts a young person can receive.”

Our experience in America, early in the 20th century, with memorization as preferred educational doctrine was a positive one. Educators recognize the incredible capacity in young children for mastery of classic and contemporary material. Prose in verse imparts upon children the structures inherent in language itself; just as many musicians vouch for the melodic and harmonic value of music in its relation to the soul, the abstract logic in poetry conveys “order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation, and contingent possibility.” According to Michael Knox Beran, this is exactly how we organize sensory experience.

It is not just about young children and their development of intellect. There is an importance in understanding the content itself, for those of any age. We are inheritors of an intellectual tradition that, while often challenged by those of higher education, is worth receiving and owning in its entirety. Great poetry and literature in its deepest form, which manifests itself in the heart as well as the mind, is an expression of a certain culture and its accumulated experience. We convey to ourselves and others a traditional Western wisdom, in context, when we have the ability to recite portions of that experience.

Replacing memorization with the sensitivities of progressive education does not achieve its goals of inner liberty. In fact, by neglecting the extensive intellectual manifold of the past it limits students far more than a devotion to any one text could. To memorize is often to possess, the way my professor’s father possesses an ennobled sense of himself in relation to Shakespeare and an essential connection a broader culture we’re unfortunately told to keep out of our hearts and minds.

The "V" Stands for Voluntarism

The following commentary is slated to appear in the February 12, 2009 issue of The Cowl, Providence College's student newspaper. Consequently, it is addressed to the student body of Providence College, so please bear this in mind while reading. It also requires some background. From 2002-2005, Providence College students performed Eve Ensler's controversial work The Vagina Monologues on campus without support from the administration led by college president Rev. Philip A. Smith, O.P. In 2006, however, new president Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P. made national headlines by banning the play's annual performance on campus, citing elements "inimical to the teaching of the Church." This year, for the fourth time, students will perform the Monologues at an off-campus location, a fact about which they are still bitter.

If one searches for the phrase “vagina monologues” on The Cowl’s website, the slow but steady server soon sends back no fewer than sixty-seven articles which touch upon this topic. The sheer volume of verbiage devoted to vaginas over the years in these pages is overwhelming. Those currently at odds—some whining, others gloating—may be surprised to note that their arguments have been appearing annually in The Cowl since 2002. Every year, those on both sides of the issue resolve to address the real problems: sexual assault and violence against women. Every year, individuals pledge to stop bickering and “further the dialogue” about these issues. And every year, February rolls around and we’re back in the trenches.

Ultimately, we can all agree about two realities in this controversy: 1) Violence against women happens, it happens here at Providence College, and this is an awful state of affairs that we must address; and 2) The Vagina Monologues will not be performed on campus during Rev. Brian Shanley, O.P.’s tenure in office. The common ground, however, ends there. The Vagina Monologues debate serves as a proxy for—and a huge distraction from—the far more important discussion of the root causes of sexual violence.

We are allowing ourselves to argue about a conclusion from two completely different sets of premises, and this cannot continue. Simply dismissing premises borne out by revealed truth and millennia of experience, the majority of the “Mono-maniacs” who support Eve Ensler’s vision preach dogmatism far more ossified than Church doctrine and infinitely more pernicious than any perceived clerical impingement of free speech: the morality of consent. For many of these people, there are no inherently good or bad acts, there are only willed and unwilled actions. Faced with an obvious and undeniably vile atrocity like rape, these persons rationalize their natural moral opposition to it: rape is an immediate and brutal act of contravening another person’s will. This is how many of our campus nihilists, who reject claims to moral truth in virtually every other sphere up to and including the sexual, can be genuinely and fervently passionate about the cause of ending rape and violence against women. When God goes out the window, His attributes are transferred to the next available object that seems sacred and worthy of reverence: the human will. Many of the leaders in The Vagina Monologues and Women Will are not just volunteerists, they are voluntarists as well.

These groups have done a tremendous job changing the popular perception of sexual assault on this campus. While most people tend to think of rape in terms of the scary stranger leaping from the bushes with a knife, events such as S.A.V.E. week have taught us that the vast majority of rape victims know their attacker, one in three assailants are intoxicated, and that for college students like us, most sexual assaults take place in the context of a hookup or similar sexual situation. We have been taught well that consent to one act does not by any means give carte blanche for everything else.

The trouble is, the public perception of sexual assault is starting to sound more and more similar to the undergraduate perception of “consensual sex.” When alcohol gets thrown into the mix, the lines get blurry, and the golden calf of consent becomes increasingly less lustrous. Saying that a young lady should be able to socialize and walk about the campus at night without being sexually assaulted is absolutely and importantly true. Saying that a girl ought to be able to get blackout drunk, put on a four-inch skirt and five-inch heels, and spend the single-digit hours of the morning tottering up and down Eaton Street and its environs without any fear of the untoward advances of similarly sloppy young males is also true, but raises the question of whether going after efficient causes is the only way to combat sexual assault.

By no means am I suggesting that drunk girls dressed in a certain way who end up getting raped “have it coming to them”—not in the slightest. I am also aware that Ensler’s greatest hit contains a monologue, “My Short Skirt,” which addresses this very issue. But the real “truth nobody wants to talk about” is this: the society that creates over 250,000 victims of sexual assault every year is inextricably, undeniably, and irredeemably bound up with the ethic of sexual license and promiscuity. To abhor the former while affirming the latter is not only non-Christian, it is nonsensical. All too many males on this campus enjoy the female vagina exactly the way its eponymous Monologues have been ever since 2006: late at night, off campus, and against the teachings of the Catholic Church. We must fight tirelessly against the violation of women in all its forms, but this fight is futile and meaningless without a commitment to sexual self-restraint. We must create—each of us, carrying out the sacred duty of stewardship of our bodies—a culture of modesty, of chastity, and of true love, which affirms the fundamentally sacramental nature of sex by saving it for a time when it can be enjoyed in all its fullness.

Dwelling in the UHS

Is an intramural dispute inevitable? Perhaps, perhaps not. The hesitations Jeremiah discussed in his recent post are worth considering, and in this vein, it’s important that we first drop the ‘quasi’ from our usual facade of ‘quasi-Heideggerianism.’

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology asked the general question, ‘What is the structure of Being?’ As it relates to global commerce, we can rephrase this is as, ‘What is the relationship between building and dwelling?’ In his Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger defined the difference between building and dwelling as between creating things and inhabiting them. This is not exclusively related to the concept of ‘home’: roads, mills, and parks involve dwelling. Where and how we dwell is intricately woven into the concept of ‘place,’ which appears to be at stake when confronted with the ‘universal homogenous state.’

For Heidegger, building is good as long as we cultivate within our phenomenological horizon. Bauen, the German word often associated with building, originally meant ‘to remain’ or ‘to stay in place.’ Staying in place leads to an acquisition of neighbors and sets one’s horizon for a limited sphere of dwelling. For Heidegger this is good building. To achieve Bauen, however, requires an anchoring of the ‘fourfold’ in everything we build.

The fourfold is the Earth, sky, divinities and mortals. Everything made by people must instantiate the fourfold. Heidegger’s example is the dwellings of inhabitants of the Black Forest. They built small houses on a terrace (Earth), design their roofs to handle massive snowfall (sky), have an altar in one corner (divinities) and a place for birth and death in another (mortals).

We can imagine a bridge today that anchors the fourfold. It spans a small river that flows through the middle of a town. Heidegger argues that things create the space they inhabit: before the bridge crosses the river, there is nothing. After the span, there are banks. There is a stream qua stream. Once this bridge creates a location, mortals can move through it. The bridge assists in the formation of neighborhoods, further facilitating local relationships.

This is in contrast to a highway bridge. You cannot walk across it. It subordinates everything to purely human purposes and eliminates divinities. Worst of all, for Heidegger, it connects the global to the local, eliminating that sense of place. Heidegger saw the fourfold as an anchor in the sense that it preserves the near and far. He feared ontological 'homelessness,' where a lack of location and place eliminated the non-interchangeable milieu inherent in local existence. We would not be able to give the thought to our dwelling that it so richly deserves. We would be destroying local and unique experience entirely.

If we fear what Heidegger feared, is the answer to take steps in eliminating or limiting international trade and finance? My position is exactly the opposite: if we take the position that McDonald’s and Starbucks and their ilk constitute ‘bad building’ and slowly wear down our sense of a qualitatively ‘good mode of dwelling,’ it is our responsibility to find a better relationship with the objects of a globalized world. Protectionism is not only bad economics in terms of wealth creation, it would not solve the problems illustrated above. Adequately preserving the local requires an incentive, and it’s not forcing neighborhood workers abroad and small businesses to fail because our idea of place requires a massive disruption in global supply chains. Manipulating trade policy for philosophical ends, I’m afraid, will eliminate the freedom to interact with our surroundings in a better way. It will not change much, except we’ll all be poorer.

There are two remedies, each of which may seem insufficient to some. First, and perhaps least important, is public: states should spend less of its taxpayers’ money on projects that crowd out local and private business. Much of spending on what big government types deem as ‘commonly good’ can only be articulated as such because it spans the widest net of public interaction. It is not local by necessity, and sees an achievement of ‘farness’ (spatially and temporally) as intricate in its goals and schemes.

Secondly, the private: find the places most satisfying to your soul and indulge in the placeness of them all. Maintain your relationship with the local despite your inevitable interaction with the global. Do so doggedly. And then bargain with Heidegger over the phenomenology of dwelling if you must.

How to get the "Big Fix" Started

The Ennobler has discussed the stimulus package before, and a recent article by David Leonhardt (a relative of a good friend of the Ennobler) gave some good insight on the current state of our economy and what lies ahead in the near future. While The Ennobler does not share the same views as Mr. Leonhardt on many issues, there is much in the article that supplies, at the very least, suggestions and objectives that politicians on both sides of the aisle should support.

While many disagree on the ways in which these objectives are to be achieved, noone in their right mind would be opposed to higher levels of growth, discussed in the article's first section. Exactly how these high levels of growth are achieved largely depends on much of what Mr. Leonhardt discusses throughout the article. This all harkens back to technology (not gadgets, but the broad sense of the word). The best way for states to increase steady state levels of growth is through improvements in technology. The best way to improve technology is by investing, educating and curing inefficiencies, all of which Leonhardt mentions. In regards to investment, he puts:

Governments have a unique role to play in making investments for two main reasons. Some activities, like mass transportation and pollution reduction, have societal benefits but not necessarily financial ones, and the private sector simply won’t undertake them. And while many other kinds of investments do bring big financial returns, only a fraction of those returns go to the original investor. This makes the private sector reluctant to jump in. As a result, economists say that the private sector tends to spend less on research and investment than is economically ideal.

One goal of governments should be to encourage markets to promote socially optimal levels of consumption of various goods. As Leonhardt discusses, these goods include investment, education and energy. The stimulus package provides a good chance to set consumption levels of these three goods at socially optimal levels. Increasing investment in research and technology, investing in education, and introducing a carbon tax while lowering marginal tax rates would all provide opportunities to cure inefficiencies and enhance growth.

Born in the UHS: Some Hesitations About Global Capitalism

I fear I may be about to touch off an intramural dispute. About a week ago, my dear colleague made some very concise, very strong arguments in favor of free trade, or at very least against protectionism. In answer to his question (“Protectionism, Anyone?”), I am still inclined to speak in the negative. Recently, however, I have begun to have hesitations about the vision of a world of free trade first and perhaps best articulated by David Ricardo, both in his own writings and as a literary character.

Now, let me be clear: I, too, am irritated by the junior senator from our beloved yet vexing home state and his incessant whining about global capitalism. I, too, am simultaneously appalled and bemused by the anti-globalization riots—er, protests—around the world, particularly when the host nation subsidizes its own antagonists. In no wise do I question the efficacy of global free-market capitalism to bring about the maximal level of prosperity. And yet, I remain unconvinced that embracing a Ricardian world is the best course for humanity.

Primarily, my concern stems from the increasingly-more-apparent tendency of global capitalism to create what Alexandre Kojeve called the “universal homogenous state.” This refers to the tendency of capitalism to eliminate all differences between peoples, nations, societies, et cetera—to obliterate all distinctions of place. Intuitively, it makes sense: we justly praise companies like Sony and Chili’s for making good products, and their popularity leads naturally to an increase in quantity supplied. It is not accident that the oft-lampooned chief critique of globalization runs something like this: whether one is in Houston, Harare or Hong Kong, one can be assured of a Starbucks on the corner and the Golden Arches in the sky.

But the truth is, the UHS creates far more dire consequences than the omnipresence of coffee and fast food. The Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant takes up Kojeve’s concept in his masterful little book Lament for a Nation. For Grant, often called a “Red Tory” for his not-as-crazy-as-it-sounds mixture of Burke/Hooker British traditionalism with mild national socialism (not that national socialism), the USA is the UHS in germ. He posits the inevitability of the global capitalism victory as he laments the death of the true Canada, which in his eyes was a propositional nation, conceived in colonial subservience and dedicated to not being America. But Canada is not the real point; our neighbor to the north is but a placeholder for all the distinct subsidiary units that are swept away and homogenized like a gallon Bernie Sanders’ beloved beverage.

Interestingly enough, the Red Tory is hardly the most famous person to invoke Kojeve. In one of the most widely disseminated works in recent history, Francis Fukuyama used a brand of Hegelianism to argue that the final victory of liberalism was nigh. The particular Hegelian he used to support his thesis was none other than our good friend Alexandre Kojeve, who had had a similar idea many years earlier. The problem is, triumphant free-market apologists who read Fukuyama’s article with joyous exuberance almost always forget the last paragraph, which for the impatient was helpfully alluded to in the title of his subsequent book. The title is this: The End of History and the Last Man.

How can we keep ourselves from becoming Nietzsche’s infamous picture of the denizens of a technologically supercharged, post-theistic age? As I myself pointed out recently, technology is not neutral, and has wide-ranging effects detrimental to the human psyche. I believe global capitalism has similar effects in that it militates against all loyalties other than the love of money. While I greatly respect Grant, socialism is clearly not the answer, and I highly doubt protection is either. But we proponents of free-market capitalism need to think deeply—and quickly—about an answer to this question: how can we prevent the engines of economic progress from grinding us into an undifferentiated mass without homes, without virtue and without hope?

The Firm Soil of Our Lives

In the volume of Shabbath in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Joshua b. Levi told a story of Moses’ experience on Mt. Sinai (sometime between the day he started his ascent and the fortieth day, when he discovered the Israelites worshipping at the foot of the golden calf). Levi tells us that the ministering angels asked God what a human man could be doing amongst them. The answer, of course, was that he’d come to receive the Torah.

Said they to Him: “That secret treasure, which has been hidden by Thee for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created, Thou desirest to give to flesh and blood!” After all, Moses is just man, and the Torah is the holiest of texts and traditions. Perhaps we can excuse the indignation at this slight of slights.

After some initial hesitation, Moses answered the angels as he was commanded to do by God. Quoting the Torah and its commandments, he asked the divinities, “Did ye go down to Egypt; were ye enslaved to Pharoah: why then should the Torah be yours?” Further: “Do ye dwell among peoples that engage in idol worship? Do ye then perform work, that ye need to rest? Is there any business dealings among you? Have ye fathers and mothers?”

Inasmuch as there exists any kind of beauty in our civil and legal doctrines, worthy of preservation and adoration, there is the mundane, turning the figurative Greek pillar of institution from white to gray, from round to square. As such, the Torah may be the most blessed of all things to the Jewish people, but a high proportion of its dealings involve the inspirational equivalent of the ethical quandary resulting from the goring of one man’s cow by another man’s ox. To what does the one man owe the other man? What is the just way to proceed? Am I supposed to feel interested in any of this?

Indeed, in rabbinic tradition the heavenly is physical (or vice versa). In law more generally, the articulation of justice is textual. This may all come as a disappointment to those who champion “the right to define one's own concept of existing, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of life” as doctrine. Existing and meaning can actually be a slog, as even those legendary Biblical figures came to find (especially Abraham’s direct descendants, whose joys and conflicts were captured well in a modern television series).

What has been given to us, either as a result of chance or nature, is no less worthy of our time or admiration just because it’s perceived as routine. The proportion of our activities that fall short of the aesthetically sublime or ‘sweetly mysterious’ is too high to conclude otherwise, lest we cast the substance of our lives to sea without anchor. Edmund Burke was said to have worshipped inanimate objects simply because they were real. Again, in law, we should strive to value that which is real in the sense that it is bound by something other than our subjective interpretation, by a thread that’s woven through time and place, linking the “here” and the “there” (or the “now” and the “then”) while stopping as close as we can to the predicament of confusing the two.

It is not just about law and religion, but about all aspects of the conservative life. Michael Oakeshott said, “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” We encounter the familiar, the fact or the actual like Heidegger encountered his “tree-in-bloom”: face-to-face, on the firm soil of our lives. The heavenly is the physical, the flesh-and-blood, lest we have no use for Torah. What is just is what is out there, contained in form and available to be articulated to human beings who share more than the ability to define their own modes of existence by their own made-up rules.

The Dust Bowl

While I must make it clear that the Ennobler in no way endorses the New Yorker or the viewpoints that it holds, I do encourage readers to dive into the depths of their archive and have a look at this article from January of 2006. The long and short of it is that 15 year old Brandenn Bremmer, who had an IQ of 178, unexpectedly committed suicide on his family’s farm in Nebraska. Here is a story of the mismanagement of a boy’s raw potential. With only a somewhat demented special children’s teacher to guide him and his parents through his education, Bremmer resorted to pursuing a career as an anesthesiologist because of the financial rewards that it promised. While it was clearly a mistake for his parents to isolate him from other children and prematurely accelerate his education, it was ultimately Brandenn who gave into his own despair.

What are the broader implications of this? Well it certainly wasn’t merely the C he got in his biology class that caused Bremmer to take his own life. More likely it was his loneliness and the feeling that he had passed his zenith as a young genius. His death reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentiments that, “there are no second acts in American lives” which he himself wrote in a time of despair. This is the darker side of the American dream; a sort of malaise that shadows the more visible success and potential. The ennobled, of course, can see the bigger picture and avoid such fatalism. Let’s hope that the dark side will remain hidden as we push through recession years.

Actually Rather Super After All

To expand upon what my esteemed colleague wrote last night, football is absolutely a “dominant example of our country's ethos”, and that might not be a good thing. I would never argue that football has not supplanted baseball as the national sport (baseball, perhaps, retains the rather ephemeral and more or less uncontested epithet of “national pastime”). I would, however, say that this sea change in the popular “culture” reflects somewhat poorly on our national character.

To the extent that the United States of America has a culture, its biggest festival is not July 4th or any of the half-dozen or so peripatetic postal holidays, the actual dates of which have become subordinate to the need to have each of them fall on a Monday. No, our Pan-American Festival is the Super Bowl, which unifies and exalts all things quintessentially and preeminently American. As George Will once wrote, "Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” The Super Bowl adds to this definition two more of the less flattering aspects of our society: a relentless blitz of exceedingly clever commercials, and the consumption of vast quantities of rather unhealthful food and beverages.

But lest we become jaded and cynical, let us not forget that at its core, the Super Bowl is the yearly culmination of a game played passionately by young men. It is marked by triumph and tears of happiness. At field level, the Super Bowl is a celebration of innocence, not of fallenness. Even amidst the fart jokes and the wayward nipples, the advertisers are starting to catch on to this fact. Think of the delightful Clydesdale commercials, or that really superb ad where the people have metamorphosed into their avatars, constantly connected to their digital devices. It takes a Coca-Cola mistakenly apprehended in a soda fountain to bring the young lady back into reality. This ad is conservative, for it affirms the value of place (and of soda fountains!). This ad is quasi-Heideggerian in that it expresses serious reservations about the effect of technology upon human persons. And, I would maintain, this ad is Catholic, since it affirms the importance of sacramentals: physical substances serving as vessels of grace.

And lest we forget: once again, the game was terrific.

Super Bowl XLIII

For those of us who argue baseball's primacy in the human order of 'sport and leisure,' this weekend is a fine time to remind ourselves of football's actual place at the top of the American sporting landscape. It is hardly a problem: Major League Baseball's record revenues indicate a love of the game, dyed-in-the-national-wool, that won't subside during recessions or after a disappointingly sub par World Series. Football may have just taken over as a dominant example of our country's ethos.

For now, enjoy the Super Bowl. We will resume posting (actually posting) shortly.

Protectionism anyone?

On Monday, I have a debate in my Political Economy class addressing the question, "Is regional integration in the best interests of its adherents?" To no surprise, I'm on the affirmative side essentially arguing whether or not free trade is a good thing. The answer seems so obvious to me that admittedly, I'm having a very tough time coming up with counter-arguments to free trade. The benefits seem obvious: free trade utilizes Ricardo's wonderful theory of comparative advantage, thus maximizing a given state's total wealth. Sure there are winners and losers, as Stolper-Samuelson and Heckscher-Olin suggest, but overall the effects net positive, and in many cases, way positive. Given proper compensation (yes, I said it), Pareto optimal outcomes are possible. It doesn't take a Utilitarian to see the benefits of free trade. Clearly, certain domestic groups have reasons to oppose free trade. But protectionism makes actual sense in few hypothetical situations and even fewer real life situations. No rational economic thinker should oppose, at the very least, the concept of free trade.

But as recent evidence suggests, this is not the case. As The Ennobler has mentioned before, our president does not have a pro-trade voting record and, despite claims that he supports free trade, has given little reason to suggest otherwise. On the other hand, his economic team is comprised of some of the best in the business, almost all of whom do support free trade. Unfortunately, many of his fellow politicians in the Legislative Branch hold some particularly protectionist beliefs. This is worrisome for many reasons, but especially the fact that protectionism typically increases during economic downturns. Following recent provisions, Bill Lane said:

Any student of history will tell you that one of the most significant mistakes of the 1930s is when the U.S. embraced protectionism. It had a cascading effect that ground world trade almost to a halt, and turned a one-year recession into the Great Depression.

Hopefully, the leaders of our country and, in particular, our President are students of history.

Ave Atque Vale: John Updike

John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday at the age of 76. One of the most prolific writers of the modern era, Updike wrote memorable novels about the American small town, the American middle-class suburb, sex, death and the divine. From time to time he’d write about baseball.

David Foster Wallace once grouped Updike among “the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction.” He was not endearing himself to the legendary author (if it wasn’t apparent enough, Updike was specifically termed the “Champion Literary Phallocrat”). Updike’s recent novel Terrorist may have been his least accomplished work. His most moving creations behind him, perhaps the Phallocrat should have made a full late-life transition to criticism. It’s no matter, for he’s gone now and his canon can be appreciated for the national treasure it is without expression of disappointment in decline or anxiousness for a more humble literary tradition to form on our watch.

Part of understanding Updike is an avoidance of one’s admittedly well-nurtured aversion to the less-than-ennobling aspects of our culture. Brooke Allen called him “the high priest of the sexual revolution”: in Couples and The Witches of Eastwick and the Rabbit series and almost everything written through the 1980’s there were sexual encounters, messy divorces and self-gratification of the highest order. There was full-fledged eroticism at every turn, and Updike struggled with being so unbelievably good at producing it.

Of course, the issue was never a bodice-ripper in emperor’s clothes as much as a generation of writers, who seemingly all hated their own fathers, coming of age at a time when Updike had been bold enough to challenge the moral wasteland of the beatniks. He represented a stern challenge to the 'sexual revolution' he proselytized at the foot of, exposing the depression and self-hatred that plagued a society of disordered passions. His most famous work, Rabbit Run, was written in response to Kerouac’s On the Road. It said, “This is what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”

The critics may have detested Updike’s seemingly absurd lack of personal anguish over the years. After all, he was an artist, though he benefited from never torturing himself over an elusive essence of cool or a transcendent aesthetic of some other kind. He was never manufacturing something in himself. What he was constantly working out in his writing was related to sex and death and the milieus he subjected himself to as he lived, but it was never really about those things. What was most important to him were “the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last.” His work may not have been modest, but he was.

Nobody likes a writer who is comfortable with his life, and his passive Protestantism was irksome in its complacency. To Updike, the world was divine and physically beautiful, and so were all of its subjects. Even the common element was deserving of flowery prose: Harry Angstrom may not deserve the love of the reader, but he earned the devotion of the author because he was situated in and emanated from a world of beauty. Updike put in more effort than most in scraping away the colorlessness as a matter of philosophy.

Updike’s characters were cut out of a distinctly American fabric and shaped by distinctly American habits. As such, he was a distinctly American writer. He was, by most accounts, a kind and generous and pious man. His artistic range was commendable in itself, but his best work was of the domestic sort. Jeet Heer argued that “no one wrote better than John Updike about what it means to be a husband and a father, about the hearth as place of emotional warmth and also a trap, about the family as a cornerstone of life.”

Updike published work until the very end, for better or worse materially, but always for better in the sense that a sincere attempt at conveying the happiness that comes with an assuredness in the good of the world is always welcome. As is the hope that it may one day prevail in our discourses on culture and perpetually exist in the hearts of the appreciative.

Boredom in the Wilderness of Gadgets

It is a view widely acknowledged to be true that any technology providing a hitherto unrealized capability must be a source of human freedom. That is to say, the undeniably astounding advances made by scientists and engineers through the centuries have had a profoundly liberating effect on us as members of the human race. We have been granted freedom from the scourge of many infectious diseases, freedom from the toil of planting and harvesting crops by hand, freedom from the constraints of geographic space, and freedom from the scarcity and expense of thousands of commercial goods.

Most recently, and more than any civilization in the history of the world, we have been treated to a vast array of attempts to free us from our boredom. At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous old geezer (a risk I take with ever-increasing frequency), I would term our American non-culture a “Wilderness of Gadgets.” In this wilderness, we are promised utterly limitless entertainment options no longer constrained by a lack of portability. The freedom from boredom afforded by movies, television, video games, digital communication and the Internet can now leave the living room and be enjoyed anytime, anywhere. The year is 2009, and everyone is finally interested.

Unfortunately, these developments in consumer technology do not so much create freedom as take it away. We see this most immediately in the form of that paradigm of our young century, the Blackberry. By means of this device, thousands of businesspeople have been made accountable for their work emails every hour of every day, from Pawtucket to Pyongyang. In this case, “wireless technology” simply means that the shackles are invisible to the naked eye. Thousands of eager young professionals have learned too late the wisdom of Laocoon: “I fear CEO’s, even bearing gifts.”

I met a young man of thirteen this winter who, as of January 5, had logged over 100 hours on Xbox LIVE since Christmas. Perhaps some of you readers can boast higher levels of dedication; honestly, I do not want to know. The point is, my young friend Andrew was so freed by his console that he did virtually nothing else for an entire two-week period. In the absence of specified scholastic obligations, he answered the Call of Duty in a decidedly different sense. The conjoined boxes of pulsating light had not so much liberated him as swallowed his existing freedom whole.

The worst part of it is, even as our gadgets satiate our ennui, they increase our propensity to boredom even more. As one becomes immersed in the ever-more-clearly visible landscapes and clearly-defined objectives of video games of all kinds (as another middle school student told me when I chastised her class for playing too much Xbox: “It’s OK, I have a PlayStation 3.” Not quite), one’s imagination begins to atrophy. There is no need to invent fantastic adventures and mysterious kingdoms when such things can be purchased for only $49.95 a pop. Thus, as one fights boredom at the cost of one’s imagination, the boredom simply grows back, multiplying in strength like the heads of a Hydra.

People espousing views like mine on this subject are often accused of being either Luddites or hypocrites, of harboring an irrational hatred of technology or, indeed, of not harboring a hatred of technology, as evidenced by the fact that critics of technology criticize via computer. This opposed but related criticisms miss the point: the great danger of gadgets is precisely that they are so appealing, that even those striving for virtue are solely tempted to squander the little time on given us on earth by using it. I am just as susceptible to the siren song of the television as the next guy, and almost certainly more so. The problem of technology is not that it is detestable; the problem is that it is easily and universally appealing.

Another contention, often made even by those who concur in my dark assessment of technology’s effects, is that technology in itself is neutral; it can be used for good or for ill, and the latter is too often the case. To my mind, this view is also mistaken. In the most literal of senses, yes; technological artifacts are inanimate, and thus neutral. But technology conditions us to think and act in certain ways, and the vast and ever-growing havoc wreaked upon our society by the present digital explosion is not simply the result of unencumbered human choice. Even as technology encourages a quest for dominion over nature and claims victory over our humanity, it feeds on the lowest impulses in our nature by appealing to our laziness and indulging our lusts, for violence in particular. Our hearts and minds are becoming enslaved, and here is the greatest irony of all: what with the death of our imaginations and the technological alienation of the human person from itself, we’re more bored than ever.