The Ennobler

Of Greens and Garbage

2011-04-22T18:23:00.005-04:00

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The triumph of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

Though in some ways political, and in part a corrective to Wordsworth, Shelley's sublime Ode demands of us a Gnostic-metaphysical interpretation: the seer asks the wind to be made an instrument of prophecy, itself delivering to the poet a revolutionary vision beyond the external world (as catastrophic, primordial Creation/Fall). In Prometheus Unbound, Jupiter is the Demiurge, Joyce's 'hangman God', opposed by Prometheus as Gnostic redeemer, whose fire is the divine spark (or pneuma), the oldest and best part of consciousness alienated by the strangeness of nature.

It is, of course, Earth Day. And it feels, in our native Vermont, as if (nearly) spring. Today at the University of Vermont a wide range of Green-minded people are outside doing Green-minded things. Their telos in many cases is to become the ecological conscience that their society so sorely lacks. And as it has been for years now, the clearest clarion call is over 'recycling awareness'. To that one might say, as the Jacobins once said to the Girondists, enjoy your 'revolution without a revolution!'

It should be no wonder that many large businesses and corporations are getting in on the Earth Day and recycling program game: paradoxically, it works for capitalism, not against it. American capitalism, for all its dynamic wealth generation and commodity movement, generates an astounding amount of trash as its excrement - not just the sheer amount of material stuff that we throw away, but the figurative garbage, the outdated technology and appliances, that piles up in our closets or basements. Though usually distasteful, the trash has its own poetic dignity (perhaps in the same way that billboards and neon lights can be the stuff of urban, futurist poetry), like the defunct attack aircraft used as a canvas for concept art in DeLillo's Underworld.

But the trash remains a powerful allegory: it is a qualitative heap of unmovable matter, the ambivalent Real of late capitalism, which is closed off from our everyday consciousness of economic process. Psychologically, we have as difficult a time imagining garbage still existing in the world (once it's collected at least) as we do imagining our shit, semen and urine surviving once they're out of sight. Here, then, resides the dark truth of our efforts to change the world by recycling: the utopian dream of the seamless recovery of our garbage, which will be reinserted into products without remainder, is the ultimate capitalist dream. The free circulation of garbage is the free circulation of capital. And the Greens tirelessly work to deprive us even of a useful, and potentially revealing, metaphor.

Now, one can trace a line from Shelley, undoubtedly a man of the Left in his day, and his Romantic contemporaries back through Milton to Spenser, and forward through Whitman to Crane, Stevens and Ashbery. Each remarkably original and New, they nevertheless contain within their work (at least) one important epistemological similarity: that Gnostic animosity towards nature. Of course, this is an ontological difference, not an ecological one. But if the predominant liberal community is going to revolutionize our approach to the environment without a revolution, then Prometheus, humanity's first subversive agent, is destined to meet his ironic end at least once more.

From Paul Krugman to Political Serialism

2011-04-19T15:42:00.005-04:00

So Paul Krugman disparages bipartisanship and civility: Democrats and Republicans, he says, should "have a frank discussion of their differences" over the budget instead of a respectful, consensus-building exchange. There is an old joke about a newly married man who's asked by his friend how beautiful his wife looks: 'I don't care for her,' he replies, 'but that's just a matter of taste.' The embedded lesson is that if I must agree with Mr. Krugman, let the marriage still lack something in the way of taste!

Krugman's point is that the 'civility police,' who have been quite ascendant in the media's mainstream as of late, are undemocratic, to which I disagree: they are, instead, democratic to the extreme. That is, it is a maddening principle of democratic government to create an empty, floating space of power to which competing values and interests must vie, the end result of which is an unusual, contracted program accepted by all who chose to compete but loved by almost none. Krugman further suggests, however, that the term 'bipartisan' is actually code for a conservative compromise, which is a far more interesting point to consider.

Bipartisan solutions are paradoxically ideological, and even if right now they theoretically hedge toward the right, our 'post-ideological' era finds everyone with a public agenda battling for the label. It typically works like this: an ideological issue is resolved by the group or persons forward-thinking enough to let the constituency know that now, after all the squabbling, it is finally time 'put our petty partisanship aside and do what's best for the country'. Of course, the resolving act itself is ideological; that is, it is an ideological move in the first instance to suggest that legislative, executive or administrative closure is unarguably in the best interests of everyone involved.

What Krugman should have said was that the cult of civility is dishonest, delusional. Levi-Strauss discusses a set of primitive Pacific Islanders who, when asked to diagram their tribe's social structure, essentially split into two camps: one camp draws a symmetrical relation between the two, and the other represents the division as a series of concentric circles. This account does not merely suggest that there is an unbridgeable, relative gap between the collective consciousness of each group, but that there is an irreducible antagonism, recognized equally across the social (class) division, which spills onto the diagrams as instantiations of the partial perspectives.

The suggestion is not a pure relativism but a move toward an actively engaged ideology, which does not sweep antagonism under the rug. This is, I will suggest, a move somewhat akin to the one between Stravinsky's middle and late periods (or, more accurately, as the Hegelian synthesis of his early and middle periods). Stravinsky once 'escaped' from the experimental phase of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird) to found a movement of precise, somewhat more stolid neoclassical works, only to embrace late in life the twelve tone system of his rival Schoenberg. This serialism, essentially a loose systematization of dissonances and chromaticisms arranged in rows, is the musical-theoretical version of a politics that takes ideology seriously. Now, to shudder at the thought that Paul Krugman is to be our Wagner.

Pushing Paper

2011-04-06T19:57:00.006-04:00

Humanistic film critics, who as a rule control the contours of mainstream cinematic 'analysis', locate the depth of contemporary cinema in the pure visibility of characters' psychic complexity. Two-dimensionality has always been an insult in criticism, though the prevalent discourse now takes three-dimensionality to refer solely to the ability of a character to undergo change in an outwardly obvious way - was Tobey Maguire's bathetic version of Spider-man not a horrific banalization of the Shakespearean mode of overhearing*, where the personality is not grasping (through crisis) at the unspeakable void but merely feeling the 'right' feelings in the 'right' order so that the narrative can close and the coupling can be consummated?

What is lost in this pop-humanism is the metonymy of the surface: the formal structure of the film's social space that opens onto a circulation of language and objects. In short, this is the Lacanian minimal distance between background and foreground (consider first, perhaps, the relationship established in a Rothko painting): one aspect of the frame's field centered on a traditional character development/movement and another on a quasi-social, excremental circulation of material. Thus, Strangers on a Train is ultimately the story of a man who lost his lighter, got it back, lost it again and got it back. Or Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de..., which follows the eponymous jewelry set and its assumption of various contextual roles (not that they exhibit as much self-doubt as Tobey Maguire, obviously, but they exist at a distance from all other objects as the stain in the field or objet petit a).

The social-symbolic field of differential relations which finds its body in the irrational objective correlative of a lighter or a pair of earrings has found its body in a different location in American politics: on paper. Paul Ryan, the messiah of conservative policy wonks eager for reduced spending, is like the (theoretical) consciousness at the origin of the quantum wave function's collapse, issuing a budget out of the virtual abyss preceding materialization (which are, in other words, those conservative Ideas suspended in the primordial think tank). Those genuinely interested in politics now know nothing unless they follow the esoteric Rules of committee and chamber; that is, inevitably, where (nearly all) the action is in a representative democracy.

The Rules guarantee the orderly circulation of paper. That is, bills and riders and co-signatures. Of course, paper is an instrument of contraction: its function is to reduce a territory of thought into language by providing a canvas, which is itself a materialization somewhat akin to the action of Schelling's God (who broke out of the rotary motion of pre-cosmic drive through the pronunciation of the Word). Its sterile movement, which the good citizen watches, as a passive spectator, is the humiliating result of a non-radical system of democracy; it is the price we pay when we vote and, incidentally, sign our political power over to the Budgeteers.

It is quite hilarious that elections take on the social importance that they do, since participation is a sign not of activism but of its disavowed opposite: de-activism. Not everyone realizes that the 'Door Close' button in elevators is useless: pushing it (whether once or five times) never speeds up the process of the door's actual closure. It exists for a reason though, as a placebo, to assuage our fears of helplessness, to provide another pointless lever to push. And so the lever of the ballot box, pulled once in November, too provides little comfort when the only game in town is the tediousness of the budget process: first a conservative dream, then a clever compromise, then a hard-won victory, never anything new.

---

*I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself? (Hamlet, 1.4)

One of Its Old Lines (Or: A New One)

2011-03-07T14:26:00.003-05:00

As the ennobling spirit is reclaimed and the spell of ennui is (finally and incontrovertibly) broken, the authors of this blog will undoubtedly issue perspectives that break, however slightly, from the pieces that were left here in cyberspace's ruin. Such is the nature of the two year lacuna that our loyal readers have met, we can only assume, with confusion, distress and many lachrymose afternoons spent wondering when the next section on Wallace's Jest would turn up.

It has never been this author's intention to place any limit on the type of analysis offered in this space. Now, it is this author's express intention to eliminate any long-standing, soft-structural (and thus quasi-social) barrier to the acceptance of any form of thought, whether aesthetic or political, on an intellectual plane as flat and smooth as the computer screen in front of you (us). It should not bother anybody, moreover, to short-circuit Aquinas and Marx, Christ and Kafka, even if the relation is merely scroll-vertical, between two posts made by different authors on consecutive days.

Is this not one of the most interesting things about the blog format, especially in the case of a multitude of authors conjoined at a singularity? The website (this website) ceases to be a model and becomes a system, albeit a thermodynamic one whose dysfunction remains essential for its function. The model, whether economic or legal, social or linguistic, is free of static and white noise. The system, asserting itself passionately as an instantiation of reality's flux, is overrun with parasites. Its internal logic does little to dispel the notion that its founding gesture is nonsensical (for if this wasn't the case when the ennobling began, surely it must be now!).

The Ennobler, in its return, is a monstrous paraphrase of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic mode:

Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point on a blog can be connected to anything other, and must be
Principle of multiplicity: only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive ("multiplicity") does it cease to have any relation to the blog
Principle of asignifying rupture: a blog may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines
Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a blog is not amenable to any structural or generative model; it is a "map and not a tracing"

On Wallace's Jest: Introduction to Language-Games

2009-04-05T16:34:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-04T11:47:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-02T16:20:00.000-04:00

“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

2009-03-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

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"

2009-03-27T06:36:00.000-04:00

“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

2009-03-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

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?

2009-03-07T21:38:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-03T16:43:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-02T02:19:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-01T17:23:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-28T14:08:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-26T23:54:00.000-05:00

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?

2009-02-25T18:05:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-25T02:26:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-21T22:21:00.000-05:00

Well done sir.

Bravo Battier

2009-02-17T23:07:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-15T16:05:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-14T20:45:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-13T09:31:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-12T19:44:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-09T18:50:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-08T19:54:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-07T18:21:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-05T16:35:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-04T18:20:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-01T18:08:00.001-05:00

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?

2009-01-31T22:56:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-29T21:16:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-26T13:12:00.000-05:00

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.

FISA's Affirmation

2009-01-25T17:18:00.000-05:00

When Senator Carl Levin and Congressman John Conyers continue the witch-hunt against Bush Administration officials for "indictable offenses" related to the War on Terror, none of us should be surprised when The New York Times and media outfits of its ilk tag along for the ride. Similarly, none of us should be surprised that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review's August 2008 decision, released just a week ago, has been stashed in the proverbial corner of media portals everywhere.

As it just so happens, the panel affirmed the Executive's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. The facts of the case (at least the non-classified facts) involve a telecom company's failure to comply with the National Security Agency's wiretap program on Fourth Amendment grounds.

The Court held that searches and seizures conducted under the President's Article II war powers were not "unreasonable," and thus exceptions to Fourth Amendment limits on intelligence gathering. But don’t sound so surprised. In Truong, the Fourth Circuit held that there were indeed circumstances where the Executive need not obtain a warrant of any type to gather foreign intelligence through surveillance. In the FISA appeals court’s In re Sealed opinion: “The President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.”

The court “took for granted that FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power.” Perhaps this is why the venom persists; the actual legal authorities involved defer to Presidential power in a measure that escapes the critics’ notice. But what the recent decision shows is exactly what has been the case all along: FISA is a creation of Congress that specifies the process through which domestic wiretaps are approved. It does not and cannot encroach on the President’s war powers. That does not change with the structure of the telecom industry either.

Now that President Obama is commander-in-chief and politically responsible for any terrorist attack resulting in loss of American life, it will be fascinating to see the left’s response to the inevitable continuation of the NSA’s wiretap program under somebody not named Bush. No President has ever rushed to abandon the powers he's been legally granted, though it's always nice to see a little more legal cover for the essential programs one might feel tempted to limit in the face of Levin & Conyers, LLP.

The kidney trade: unfair or unethical?

2009-01-24T21:13:00.001-05:00

A recent chat with one of my friends reminded me of a topic that I haven't given much thought as of late: the economics and ethics of kidney donations. In the United States, there is an extreme shortage of kidneys, basic economics suggest that an increase in price will lead to an increase in supply, thus reducing this shortage. But this is illegal in the United States, so the list of organ donors is composed of the dead and the altruistic. Clearly the number of altruists falls short of the number of patients. Even though you only need one kidney to live a normal life and the procedure is very safe, most citizens are unwilling to sacrifice their body for another human's life. From an economic standpoint, the answer to this seems clear: let people sell their organs.

But not so fast. Understandably, there is a "yuck" factor in regards to an organ trade. Many think that selling one's organs is repugnant or unethical. Others argue that it devalues human life. These arguments mark valid opposition to a kidney market. I have little interest in making a normative argument over the ethics of selling one's body parts. There is, however, another argument against the organ trade that I find preposterous: that it unfairly benefits the rich.

I won't deny that an organ trade would probably benefit the rich more than the poor. Certainly, with more money at their disposal, were a kidney trade legalized, the wealthy would have easier access to the market. I don't, however, think this should limit the ability of a wealthy citizen to, essentially, save their own life. I'm sure the rich "unfairly" benefit from plane tickets to Hawaii and I'm sure the rich "unfairly" benefit from the housing market (though an effort to change that sure didn't work out too well). Should making these purchases be illegal? Last time I checked, the United States was not a country found on socialist values. Point is, we're talking about saving lives here, ceteris paribus, a rich person's life is worth no more than a poor person's, rich people deserve a kidney no more than a poor person. But denying the rich access to a market that would save their own lives is in itself unethical.

Despite the fact that a kidney trade would be "unfairly" beneficial to the rich, that doesn't mean it would be detrimental to the poor. In fact, plenty of poor people could afford to buy organs themselves, through health insurance or donations. Not only that, but the waiting list would be shorter and the probability of any individual on the waiting list receiving a kidney would go up. In addition, as the organ market stands now, the rich can often buy their organs illegally either through the black market or otherwise. In regards to those on the waiting list for kidneys, creating a kidney market would get as close to a pareto improvement as I can imagine.

While the logistics of a legalized kidney trade would need to be worked out, I believe it is an area that deserves more attention. It seems that a kidney trade could be appealing to individuals who are either pro-life or pro-choice. Hopefully this is not a topic that is above our President's pay grade. Maybe a kidney trade is unethical. If it is, however, it's not due to inequality, but rather moral righteousness.

Executive Orders and National Headaches

2009-01-22T21:12:00.000-05:00

Earlier today President Obama signed a series of executive orders pertaining to the country’s anti-terror detention network. He has directed that the Guantanamo facility be closed within the year, as well as a multi-agency review of each prisoner's case to determine who can safely be released to third countries, which cases can be referred for trial in U.S. federal court and which cases require some other disposition.

Throughout the transition process, Obama indicated that he understood the security and logistical challenges facing a successful closure of Guantanamo. Now that it appears to be a political reality, it’s worth asking: what’s the problem with Guantanamo anyway?

Currently residing in the detention facility are nearly 250 prisoners, the vast majority of which are legitimate enemy combatants who pose an acute danger to our nation’s armed forces and citizens. It’s now the job of the Attorney General and ‘multi-agency reviewers’ to repatriate as many of them as possible. It’s been reported that 60 cleared detainees are staying in U.S. judicial hands for fear of persecution following release. Without the luxury of a remote naval base with advanced and robust defense capabilities to house them away from domestic shores, any mainland facility would instantly increase the probability of terror attacks by providing an all-too-sensible target. The benefits (putting the name ‘Guantanamo’ out of our collective conscience) would be immaterial, and the costs could be fatal.

Reworking the prosecution framework makes the detainee’s housing problem look like a walk through Maple Street Park in July. The Military Commissions Act built a clear and sophisticated piece of jurisdictional infrastructure geared towards the attainment of an all-important balance between our general legal principles and security interests. This may be doomed to collapse now that detainees will have their day in U.S. federal court. Many prisoners have been detained as a result of gathered intelligence that determined them to be too dangerous to do anything else with, despite the fact that a crime was not in actuality committed. They will be released. Further, under current law and disposition, conviction with the evidence gathered on the battlefield (minus that which is not adequate due to Miranda violations) will always be an uphill battle.

Making the rounds in Obama circles is the possibility of creating a special court presided over by federal judges for the purpose of supervising detentions and administering trials. The court would “operate under rules of evidence and classification that would allow the military to avoid compromising intelligence sources and methods, as well as admit intelligence gathered under battlefield conditions.”

Now that sounds like a good idea. It would be all the more impressive if it didn’t turn out exactly the same, in purpose and form, as the military commissions developed by Congress and the Bush Administration in 2006. It’s becoming increasingly obvious, amid all the backslapping associated with Obama’s first steps towards closing Guantanamo, that the commissions we’ve had in place were well designed and necessary. There is virtue to Guantanamo as it sits today. Perhaps we could deal with a shallow bit of politicking on the part of President Obama if Bush’s policies are recycled with a new nametag and spit shine. A continuation of his predecessor’s brilliant track record on national security would be a real win for a new President who values his nation’s citizens more than his nation’s image abroad.

Farewell, President Bush

2009-01-19T23:36:00.000-05:00

I never had the honor of voting for George W. Bush. Although his presidency spanned the formative years of my political life, I was too young in both 2000 and 2004 to cast my ballot one way or the other. Thus, the man who won both of the first two elections during which I possessed a significant degree of knowledge and engagement did so without the benefit of my vote.

In 2004, he also did so (miraculously and inexplicably) without my endorsement. For reasons which are no longer clear to me, I threw my meaningless and, thankfully, ineffectual support behind the unflaggingly mediocre junior senator from Massachusetts. I think peer pressure played a role, as did my rather lazy reluctance to defend a man who was—and remains—the member of the human race our generation detests more than any other, living or dead.

I was wrong then, and although I was unfair to Mr. Bush at that time, I hope to atone somewhat now and offer a feeble reminiscence of his virtues.

First and foremost, George W. Bush has been the most staunch defender of human life—in particular of the unborn—the White House has ever seen, and he will probably retain this distinction in perpetuity. His belief in the sanctity of human life, informed and strengthened by his deeply and sincerely held religious faith, informed all aspects of his presidency. Many have blasted him for caring about inconsequential lines of stem cells more than the United States troops he sent into harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this criticism imputes a viciousness to the man which requires a faith in the unseen much stronger than any of the evangelical proclivities which supposedly catapulted him into office. Arguing that Bush is an evil, greedy warmonger puts one in the position of defending the devotion to human life of such paragons as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and ignoring the almost constant vigil of tears and prayers our commander-in-chief has kept at the caskets of our fallen troops. Nor was Bush merely a nay-sayer on life issues; he spearheaded initiatives to use non-embryonic stem cells, which have resulted in great progress, and he has worked tirelessly to help alleviate the ravages of the AIDS virus in Africa.

Secondly, despite the savage, brutal and ridiculous attacks which were hurled upon him from the very day he set foot upon the national stage, he kept his incredible composure at all times, frequently flashing his wonderful smile and terrific, always self-deprecating wit. Simply put, Bush handled lava-like torrents of abuse with a bottomless well of grace. “Some folks look at me,” he said at the 2004 Republican Convention, “and see a certain swagger. Well, in Texas we call that walking.” This pithy observation sums up the whole of the Bush presidency. Somehow, people all over the world look at the somewhat goofy, eminently likable man in charge of our Executive branch and see 1) the stupidest primate ever to crawl the earth, less worthy of compassion or admiration than the Great Apes of Spain, who now (unlike the noble men held with no cause whatsoever in the soon-to-be-redesignated Guantanamo Bay facility) possess habeas corpus rights, and 2) a demonic figure, the Devil himself in chaps and a diabolical grin. In fact, it is entirely accurate to say that many of these folks believe Dubya to be the most evil being in the universe, since they sure as hell don’t believe in the Devil.

This interesting myopia—the belief that all moral and values are relative, except for the immutable and unadulterated wrongness of George Walker Bush—provides the fodder for the final point in my eulogy of the outgoing Chief Executive. In his truly magnificent farewell address last Thursday evening, Bush recalled that “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.” Bush may well be wrong about many things, but in this observation he is dead accurate. There are indeed good and evil in our world, and moral absolutes do indeed make a great many people very uncomfortable. In the end, the reason Bush was so detested by so many is that he dared to spend his presidency—and his life, which he can now continue happily—in an uncompromising, untiring, unapologetic pursuit of the good.

To what end is diversity?

2009-01-17T01:56:00.000-05:00

The mission statement of Carleton College reads as follows:

The mission of Carleton College is to provide an exceptional undergraduate liberal arts education. In pursuit of this mission, the College is devoted to academic excellence, distinguished by the creative interplay of teaching, learning, and scholarship, and dedicated to our diverse residential community and extensive international engagements.

Sounds good. Nothing too revolutionary or controversial. At first glance, I would tend to believe that the college is doing its best to pursue the goals set in the mission statement. But is it really?

I'm drawn to the penultimate line in the statement, that the college is "dedicated to our diverse residential community." There is no doubt in my mind that Carleton College is among a large percentage of schools across the country that are doing their best to attract as diverse a campus as possible (though this is not necessarily the case for all schools). These institutions have used affirmative action, legally in most cases, to increase the diversity of their campuses in order to attract students and, as a professor of mine said recently, use diversity as a "pressure for innovation." These seem like noble intentions.

Quickly glancing at the Carleton College website, one is bound to come across a statement such as "a primary mission of the academy must be to create a climate that cultivates diversity and celebrates difference." But if diversity is so important, why do I see such little diversity across the political spectrum on campus? In essence, why don't colleges seek to enhance diversity by reaching out to young conservatives?

Giving a litmus test for college applicants would neither be legal nor justified, but if diversity is the goal, I'm sure that schools like Carleton could do a better job creating a more diverse student body. Maybe these schools are doing their best to attract students with religious upbringings and/or conservative values, but there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case. It would not be a stretch to say that 90% of the student body would identify themselves as liberal. If the goal of the college is to increase and promote diversity and difference, as this states, then there should be more of an effort to reach out to conservative youths. If the goal of the college is to increase racial and/or international diversity, then it should say so.

That being said, I have to admit that I have greatly benefited from the diversity at my school. After growing up in one of the least racially diverse places in the country, I am thankful for the opportunity to meet and become very good friends with a racially diverse group of people. On top of that, being exposed to such a liberal atmosphere has helped me strengthen some of my beliefs and has given me ample access to opposing views. On the other hand, I am not thankful for being neglected the chance to meet a large number of students with a wide range of political beliefs.

Huntington and Davos Gazan

2009-01-15T20:03:00.000-05:00

Samuel Huntington, prominent Harvard political scientist and author, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81. In his magnum opus, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington discussed what he viewed as the most dangerous illusions of the Western elites in their perception of world order and international behavior. He introduced the term Davos Man, referring to those who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite's global operations”.

Now that the State of Israel has returned to the bitter tips of leftist academics’ tongues, it may be worth understanding the implications of Huntington’s theses, even if only posthumously.

Implicit in the left’s standard anti-Israel position (and somehow the standard position seems to always recommend the trying of IDF officials as war criminals) is what appears to be an acceptance of Davos Man. We are routinely led to believe that the Israeli and Palestinian people all want the same things (peace, a home, and economic prosperity), and that their representative bodies are killing each other’s children in spite of this. Israel is just always the worst offender.

Contrary to what you may have heard, Hamas is not much of a legitimate, democratically elected body. The Palestinian Authority itself gains legal legitimacy from the Oslo Accords, which Hamas has systematically rejected. However, they did receive enough votes in the PA’s parliamentary election to find themselves in the position they're in now. And the Gazans they represent chose them because – well, some combination of Fatah corruption, Fatah infighting, change they could believe in, and plain old ideology. If universal healthcare was on the docket, I didn’t hear about it.

So maybe Davos Gazan isn’t appropriate. Anyone with any knowledge of the complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict should reject the idea that the only thing standing between war and peace is a "road map" with more Palestinian concessions here, a forfeiture of key West Bank settlements there, and a Golan Heights to be named later.

But perhaps I’m getting too far ahead of myself. For Huntington’s rejection of a non-cultural, internationalist community of states governed only by their utilitarian interests can actually be found in the same quarters examined before. European spokesmen of all sorts seem to find incoherence a habit too difficult to break with respect to the United States’ Imperialist Stooge of Nations. For how many times have we heard the cries of ‘disproportionality’ when Israel engages any of its amicable neighbors?

Israel, the thinking goes, should distribute force in a manner proportional to the damage incurred by its own population. Proportions refer to fractions, and while the easiest strategy is to compare the respective death counts (which of course ignores Hamas’ role in grotesquely padding its own score sheet by using innocents as shields), the initial rocket attacks on Southern Israel produced a fraction that is mathematically undefined. The denominator (Palestinian deaths at the hands of the IDF) was zero between the unilateral pullout of Gaza by Israel and the initial campaign back across the Gazan border.

All this means is that (surprise!) the standards of conduct for Israel are just that much higher than for Hamas. There is something about Israel that owes us civilized restraint and Hamas that will deliver savagery no matter what. Culture is not everything, but as Huntington sought to demonstrate, it surely is something. We’re willing to admit that much. Now we have to decide whether certain regimes can operate in an arena where the actual interests of its own people and the people of the world are taken for granted as objectives. For the sake of free society, some of the other organizations, with Qassam in one hand and Iranian aid in the other, should be crushed for good.

Spend on Schools

2009-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

This Thomas Friedman piece in Saturday's New York Times offers a good idea for the upcoming economic stimulus. Whether or not a federal stimulus package is desirable at this point in time is still up for debate, but since it seems inevitable that a stimulus (and a large one at that) will be passed very soon, Friedman's underlying proposal, that more should be spent on education, is a good one. General tax cuts aside, the stimulus should take the form of supplying public goods (that's econ 101 public goods, those that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous), particularly subsidizing education and defense spending. Friedman touches on the former and while the logistics of his proposal are iffy at best, the overall message is a good one.

Looking Forward

2009-01-09T12:16:00.000-05:00

We apologize for the lack of posts (good or otherwise) authored over the past month or so. The Ennobler team has been on break, so we can chalk the aforementioned dearth of intellectual activity up to holiday excess, familial obligation or pre-111th Congressional ennui.

Luckily for you, we're celebrating the new year with a new posting schedule designed to increase our output two-, maybe three-fold. If nothing else, we have that to look forward to in 2009.

Cheers,
The Ennobler

In Anticipation of Nothing New

2008-12-09T12:01:00.000-05:00

On February 22, 1946, George Kennan (then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR) sent the Long Telegram, a profoundly significant letter outlining the author’s views of the Soviet enemy and the stakes of the Cold War to come. The telegram helped shape American foreign policy attitudes towards its competing superpower in part because of the force of Kennan’s argumentation. More important, though, was the fact that the foundation of the Long Telegram was unabashedly thrown into the public sphere. The Truman Doctrine was based on it, successive presidents and their administrations embraced it, and the American people were aware of it.

The New York Times has reported that Barack Obama is considering making a major foreign policy address from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office. Surely his aim will be to start the international healing process by articulating a tolerant position on the role of Islam in the numerous threats faced by the Western world. If a modern Long Telegram exists, it would be wise to bet against its appearance in the speech at Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus.

Mr. Obama and his defense team may have already pinpointed the relevant methods, self-perceptions and structures that Islamists possess and must be eliminated through military and diplomatic means. The problem is that, even if this was the case, we don’t really want to hear about it. Countering hateful ideology often requires a step onto an ideological ledge of our own. It requires drawing a line between good and bad beliefs. It is this line that we’ve been told to eliminate.

We’re told to eliminate the line on campus. When a conservative organization at The George Washington University announced its “Islamofascism Awareness Week” last year, student representatives earned a chance to discuss their program on CNN. Except instead of receiving a forum to criticize an ideology that wanted all of them (and everyone in the studio, and everyone at their school) dead, they found themselves on national television backpedaling against criticisms that their project was racist. If only the speed in which multiculturalists eliminated this threat could be replicated by our intelligence services.

When either the back of a Subaru or an actual person tells you to “Coexist,” the message is usually targeted at President Bush and his band of neoconservatives, not the man with the dull razor blade in all those horrible decapitation videos that somehow go ignored. Even if Mr. Obama inherits a nation more acquiescent to his brand of foreign policy, whatever that may be, the fear of ideological confrontation with everything short of a man with a small moustache remains. How could an official serving the Obama administration ever produce an effective Long Telegram when even President Unilateral Aggression didn’t have the heart to call the ‘war on terror’ a ‘war on radical Islam’? Last I checked 9/11 wasn’t caused by a failure of the American government to recognize the Irish Republican Army.

How long before our intellectual cowardice dissipates I don’t know. But until it does, we have about as good a chance of making actual progress against the ideas that form the lifeblood of anti-American terrorism as we have hearing Barack Obama say “Islamofascism” in Damascus.

Are We All Immaculately Conceived?

2008-12-08T18:22:00.000-05:00

Today, December 8, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. This Catholic feast day, a Holy Day of Obligation since Pope Pius IX declared it so in 1854, commemorates the Blessed Virgin Mary’s being conceived without the stain of Original Sin present in every other human being since the Fall of Adam. It does not, as many persons both within and outside the Church believe, celebrate Christ’s conception by the Holy Spirit.

This feast is a fascinating one, a fact which is brought home forcefully to those of us at the only true Dominican institution of higher learning in this country. A veritable all-star lineup of Dominican theologians and saints, including Thomas Aquinas himself, were staunchly opposed to the doctrine—a fact which the Dominican homilists did not let their congregations forget today. It was the Franciscans (minus the great St. Bonaventura) whose theology prevailed in this question, and while the other mendicant friars have not forgotten this, they are gracious in acknowledging the error of their predecessors.

It is not only the history of the feast’s commemoration that is fascinating, however. At the very core of this long-standing doctrine is the Catholic belief in Original Sin. The great G.K. Chesterton was once (well, was always) in an argument with the very able playwright George Bernard Shaw, and Chesterton asked this confirmed old agnostic whether he believed in Original Sin.

“Of course not,” said Bernard Shaw. “That’s just a fiction invented by the Catholic Church to keep itself in business.”

“Well,” asked the portly polemicist, “do you believe in the Immaculate Conception?”

“Of course not,” repeated the dramatist. “That’s just an old superstition.”

“I’m afraid,” replied GKC, “Mr. Shaw, that you must choose one or the other. If there is no original sin, then we are all immaculately conceived. Surely you are not less moderate than the Church, which holds that only one person was ever born without sin?”

Chesterton’s question is one with which we all must grapple. Surely we don’t believe that humanity was conceived without at least some propensity to sin? And yet, today Original Sin is widely regarded as exactly the sort of old wives’ tale Bernard Shaw believed it to be. It seems that in eliminating the idea of sin from the public consciousness, we have merely excised all guilt (that stereotypically Catholic emotion). Chesterton is quite good on this point in his writings, pointing out that denying the preponderance of sin is denying objective reality, and that a healthy sense of guilt and shame for bad actions is vital to a just and moral society (and Molly O’Donnell goes “erghh!”).

A dispute on this exact matter, in fact, led a woman sitting in front of two authors of this forum at the Independence Day fireworks this summer to wheel about and yell “Do you realize you haven’t shut up this entire time!?” She was right; but her question went unasked until I uttered the word “sin”. We live in a society that wants to act badly and be congratulated for it. Surely these folks are not less moderate than the Church, which is willing to meet sinners halfway—in the Sacrament of Reconcilation?

Please Drink Responsibly

2008-12-05T13:48:00.001-05:00

Today is the 75th anniversary of the ratification of Amendment XXI to the United States Constitution. It's as good a day as any for Jeremiah to read Aethiopis with a glass of Keystone Light, don't you think?

Above: Bloggers Jason Weischedel and Jeremiah Begley enjoy one beer apiece before returning to campus to finish their homework.

Cheers,
The Ennobler

Otium Redefined: A Critique of Undergraduate Culture

2008-12-02T07:39:00.000-05:00

The following commentary will appear in this week’s issue of The Cowl, the student-run newspaper of Providence College. Once again, The Ennobler scoops the competition.

I used to believe our college to be plagued by a lack of intellectual seriousness. It seemed to me that, in the minds of many on this campus, study was an engagement to be hurried through and avoided if all possible. Intellectual tasks were chores that had to be done before the real fun could begin.

My assessment of the facts has not changed. These pernicious attitudes are still prevalent, but I have begun to question my erstwhile contention that they arise from a lack of seriousness. Indeed, in one sense excessive seriousness about academic work could lead one to equate education with hard labor. Perhaps what is truly lacking at our institution is a healthy measure of intellectual levity, or playfulness.

In the ancient conception of things, life is divided up into two categories: otium, usually rendered as “leisure,” and negotium, the opposite. Significantly, leisure is the primary thing, and “work” is defined as its negation, not as a thing in its own right. One performs the mundane duties of negotium solely for the sake of gaining time and resources for otium, the basis of culture and the true meaning of life.

Although this view is certainly foreign to much of American society, in which people define themselves by their employment to such an extent that they willingly work sixty or more hours per week, it may sound familiar and refreshing to us as youth. If, so to speak, everybody’s working for the weekend, does it not follow that everybody should do only enough to forestall a grade point average disaster?

Actually, it does not. In fact, grades have unquestionably helped bring about the catastrophic redefinition of the life of the mind as negotium. This category mistake is at the very heart of our problem. The otium toward which the Greeks and Romans directed their existence is the very pseudo-negotium which we shunt aside and perform perfunctorily. Intellectual levity, therefore, is the virtue of recognizing the tremendous privilege and blessing of being granted a liberal arts education.

We are given four years of our lives to spend, essentially, however we please. This liberty is intended to afford us the opportunity for intellectual exploration, as we move gradually from a general immersion in Western civilization toward a slightly more specialized area of study to which we become particularly devoted. The theological, philosophical, historical and literary treasures of almost three millennia are laid at our unworthy feet. Here is the best of what has been thought and said, we are told; what would you like to read? And we reply: Thank you, yes. I will have fourteen cans of Natural Ice.

Youthful exuberance and experimentation aside, those who repeatedly and consistently make such a choice declare themselves unworthy of being in college. Those who squander the chance to drink deeply at the bottomless well of truth by habitually drinking deeply at various off-campus establishments are tacitly but unequivocally registering a preference to be in a different environment. They deserve the coal mine. They deserve the steel mill. The treasures of Western culture are wasted on those who wish to dispense with them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Of course, it is precisely because most of us wish to avoid a career in smelting or coal extraction that we tend to treat our studies solely as a means to another end. It is frequently alleged that the majority of students simply are not here in order to be swept off their feet by Renaissance poetry; they are here because the job market dictates they have a college degree, whether earned or otherwise, and they wish to comply. This fact leads many to major in one of the false disciplines which have crept into our undergraduate catalog and grown, like huge malignant tumors, to a position of dominance. The distinguishing characteristic of these disciplines, most of which have been conveniently consolidated into the new School of Business for easy reference, is that no one could possibly enjoy them on their own merits. Unlike reading Homer, which is an intrinsic good pleasurable to the well-adjusted soul regardless of any additional benefit or outcome, these disciplines are studied only instrumentally, for the purpose of making money.

Preeminent among these are the immensely popular troika of Marketing, Management and Finance, which devour fearful undergraduates like the three heads of Cerberus. These sophistic arts are among the biggest culprits in the destruction of intellectual playfulness. They play upon our fears of rejection in the marketplace, and whisper sweet nothings of financial security in our ears.

I say it's time to end the tyranny of pseudo-practicality. We all need jobs, of course, and it may well be that not everyone will experience a joyful awakening while studying the liberal arts. But there is no better preparation for any job than the skills which attend naturally with the study of a true discipline: reading perceptively, writing well, and having a sense of what life is really about. What need have we for Leadership Studies when Aeneas still leads his men to the Lavinian shore?

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-18T22:09:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-16T19:47:00.000-05:00

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?"

2008-11-11T12:03:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-06T19:13:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-05T23:54:00.000-05:00

"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

2008-11-04T23:10:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-03T14:48:00.000-05:00

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.

Election Choice(s)

2008-10-29T14:39:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has been running 'The Election Choice' series about major policy differences between the two candidates. Here is what they have so far:

Health Care (Joseph Rago)

Taxes (Brian M. Carney)

Unions (Jason L. Riley)

Energy (Joseph Rago)

Trade (Mary Anastasia O'Grady)

Education (Joseph Rago)

More issues to be posted daily.

A reason to worry?

2008-10-28T00:48:00.000-04:00

Steven Calabresi gives his thoughts on the impact Barack Obama, if elected, could have on our federal courts. This excerpt sums up a large issue at stake in the upcoming election:

If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.
Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation's courtrooms.

Fred Smith on taxes

2008-10-25T04:12:00.000-04:00

I just came across this wonderful article in today's Wall Street Journal. FedEx CEO Fred Smith points out some essentials to improving our economy, including lowering the corporate tax rate, opening our borders, and providing incentives to our nation's workers. Here's some of the highlights, part of which directly relates to Zach's post three days ago.

"The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.
He sees a big problem in that so few Americans now pay any income tax. "We're now at a point where a very large part of the population pays no federal income tax at all. When you have a majority of the population that realizes that you can transfer money from the productive to themselves, that's one of the great questions for the future of civilization, as far as I'm concerned."

Heller and Roe

2008-10-24T13:01:00.000-04:00

Jason pointed us to this gem from The New York Times Washington section, written by Adam Liptak. And it pains me to say that our criticism is less directed at any Times writer than the eminently respectable Judges J. Harvey Wilkinson III and Richard A. Posner. The article details the (probably exaggerated) criticisms of the recent D.C. v. Heller decision by conservative legal theorists, comparing the reasoning to, of all cases, the majority in Roe.

The judges [Wilkinson and Posner] used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

Not quite. There are certainly practical reasons why judges might defer to legislatures (as the pragmatist Posner will tell you). Originalist jurisprudence, however, holds that issues like abortion should be left to state legislatures because that is what the Constitution intended. Nowhere in the text of the Constitution or Bill of Rights is there an explicit right to privacy that the Roe majority so egregiously relied upon. The framers of the Bill of Rights quite explicitly, whether people wish they had or not, dealt with firearms.

This is what Antonin Scalia means, in his Heller majority opinion, when he says that certain policy options are off the table. If the Second Amendment did not exist, or if an abortion amendment did, the 'conservative' legal reasoning on both issues would be far more similar. Scalia et al. would have been happy to leave absolute gun control to the political process if it was something the Constitution allowed the political process to consider.

“In both Roe and Heller,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “the court claimed to find in the Constitution the authority to overrule the wishes of the people’s representatives. In both cases, the constitutional text did not clearly mandate the result, and the court had discretion to decide the case either way.”

Wilkinson is correct in one regard. This is exactly what the court did in Roe. But any other reading of the Second Amendment besides one that guarantees an individual right is sorely mistaken. The text is as follows:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Nowhere else in the Bill of Rights does the phrase "right of the people" refer to a government's right instead of an individual's. The Bill of Rights was adopted, after much petitioning on the part of anti-federalists, to protect rights of individuals against the state. Just because we tend to think of rights these days as entitlements doesn't mean this has any basis in historical, Constitutional reality.

Scalia and District Court Judge Laurence Silberman provide further historical evidence regarding the term 'militia.' Needless to say, the framers were not thinking of any arm of government, like the National Guard, that would be tasked with saving itself from itself. They were referring to bands of neighbors and citizens who may find it necessary to form a militia to defend their rights against a particular regime. If this seems outdated and absurd today, the amendment process is quite explicit too.

“There is now a real risk that the Second Amendment will damage conservative judicial philosophy” [says Wilkinson] as much as Roe “damaged its liberal counterpart.”

The difference is that liberal judicial philosophy is whatever liberal judges want it to be. Heller does not change the fact that originalists place the utmost respect in what the Constitution allows and forbids.

Cartoon of the Day

2008-10-23T18:14:00.000-04:00

This cartoon has been making its way through the conservative blogosphere. Hat tip: JJG.

Lerrick and the "Tax Tipping Point"

2008-10-22T18:11:00.000-04:00

Adam Lerrick, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon, wrote a nice article for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page today which asks, "How long before taxpayers are pushed too far?" He discusses the implications of Barack Obama's proposed tax code, based around the always-nebulous liberal concept of 'fairness,' on our nation's most productive workers.

It's certainly worth a read, as is the entire page, but his succinct summation of the process already underway was my favorite part:

The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.

Whither Burke?

2008-10-21T20:40:00.001-04:00

Edmund Burke's Wikipedia page is not particularly impressive. It consists of a biography, a summary of his positions on the American and French Revolutions, and a "legacy" section that contains mostly quotes from his admirers and critics. There is little about his thought that is not tied up in specifics. Ludwig Wittgenstein's page appears to be at least five times as long.

It would be a lot to ask college students, who seem to detest anything that could possibly be labeled 'conservative', to read Burke. It is not a lot to ask the philosophic and academic communities to give him the time of day. And it could only help the state of conservative discourse in this country to heed Burke as a starting point before we get into whatever it is we've been getting ourselves into.

Italian Unification was achieved by a brain, a heart and a sword. There is not a lack of the latter in American conservatism, for it would be hasty to say that much air has been let out of our status as a center-right nation of, largely, patriots. There is plenty of the former. Those of us initially attracted to conservatism because of its empirical aims have more data than we can parse to use against opponents of a flat tax, or sound money or the surge. The American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, last I checked, are still productive.

But Giuseppe Mazzini's arrival continuously eludes us. We have endorsed and supported McCain-Palin for more than a few reasons, many of which we may discuss in the next two weeks (full disclosure: the author has been associated with the campaign). There is little doubt in our mind that McCain-Palin is the less expensive, more responsible and generally preferable option. Still, no one has prioritized reestablishing a foothold in an intellectual tradition that, ultimately, provides the soil for conservative policy ideals. Some of us saw the plants flourish and looked for the seeds, but for most conservatives the process is more linear. It makes more sense.

What is the reason that conservatives seek high office? Do they want to talk about people, to people or with people? Where does our seriousness come from? And what are the implications of our thought?

I see John McCain and Sarah Palin every night. Where is Edmund Burke?

Election Time... Let's talk about trade

2008-10-21T16:50:00.000-04:00

Seeing how this blog is not intended to be focused on sports, I find it necessary to address another topic. One of my favorites; free trade. The upcoming election provides us with two candidates whose voting records are entirely different. Senator McCain has been an unequivocal supporter of free trade whose voting record can be seen here. Despite his claims that he does, indeed, support free trade, Senator Obama's voting record and economic plan suggest otherwise. Hopefully, if elected, Senator Obama will revoke his populist comments, but his prior record gives us little reason to believe that that will be the case.

More Athletics

2008-10-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Scott Mosher and the Essex boys soccer team for solidifying the top seed in the upcoming playoffs. Unfortunately, the season ended with a heartbreaking 1-0 loss to North Country, but a 13-1 record is not too shabby. Hopes are high for the Tri-Sabers in their attempt to bring the trophy back to Essex in the year of the program's 50th anniversary. They play their quarterfinal match on Friday against the winner of Burlington vs. Brattleboro. Assuming the favored Burlington wins, they could provide a tough test after only losing to Essex 1-0 a couple weeks ago. Essex certainly has a big edge, but Burlington's goalie is very good and sometimes a hot goalie and a lucky break is all it takes to win a soccer game. Fortunately, Essex boasts David Ramada (who, according to my unbiased opinion, is the top netminder in the state) and some talented underclassmen scattered across the field. They shouldn't have too much trouble claiming a spot in the quarterfinals. If anyone wants to read more on the Tri-Sabres and their outlook on the postseason, I'm sure that "Sport Shorts" in the Essex Reporter will have some in-depth analysis on the upcoming matchups.

MVP thoughts

2008-10-20T21:03:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year when we get to hear utterly ridiculous arguments as to why various undeserving players somehow deserve the MVP award. The two races this year are both intriguing, yet completely different. In the NL you have many very good players, but one, Albert Pujols, who is head and shoulders above the rest. In the AL the story is different, many solid players, but none of whom stand out. Here's my rankings:

3. Grady Sizemore- 3.48 WPA (5th) , 62.7 VORP (2nd), 8.1 WARP1, .374 OBP, .502 SLG, 38 SB/5 CS, "clutch" 0.64 (12th)
2. Dustin Pedroia- 3.29 WPA (6th), 62.3 VORP (3rd), 9.8 WARP1, .376 OBP, .493 SLG, 20 SB/1 CS, "clutch" 1.47 (1st)
1. Joe Mauer- 4.88 WPA (1st), 55.5 VORP (8th), 9.6 WARP1, .413 OBP, .451 SLG, "clutch" 1.42 (2nd)

These three would be followed by A-Rod, Kevin Youkilis, Carlos Quentin, Aubrey Huff, Josh Hamilton, Justin Morneau, and Ian Kinsler. Best of luck to all the candidates, may the most valuable player, and preferably the most noble, win.

Manifestly Even, If That Makes Sense

2008-10-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

Tampa Bay: 97-65, 4.78 Runs Scored/Game, 4.14 Runs Allowed/Game
Boston: 95-67, 5.22 Runs Scored/Game, 4.26 Runs Allowed/Game

Tampa Bay: Pythagorean Over/Under 5.2 (wins over expected record)
Boston: Pythagorean Over/Under -1.0 (wins under expected record)

Tampa Bay: Hitter VORP 159.4, Pitcher VORP 291.0, Defensive Efficiency .710
Boston: Hitter VORP 238.4, Pitcher VORP 276.0, Defensive Efficiency .699

I would say, Jeremiah, that the only thing manifestly better about the Rays this season is their storyline.

ALCS Lost, Virtue Regained?

2008-10-20T10:56:00.000-04:00

This post may also appear in an upcoming issue of The Cowl, Providence College's student newspaper. Enjoy this sneak peak.

Rooting for the Red Sox during their 86-year championship draught was difficult, but good for the soul. It taught humility, perseverance and hope. Providence College President Fr. Brian Shanley, O.P., Ph.D., whose impressive moral character was formed during a lifetime of Fenway futility, often used to cite his Sox in reference to the problem of evil.

In 2004, however, the Red Sox won the World Series and everything changed. The virtuously loyal were justly rewarded, but sycophants flocked to the proverbial bandwagon. The concurrent success of the Patriots and Celtics created a perfect storm: the green-eyed monster of envy had metamorphosed into a Green Monster of jealousy, and an institutional feeling of entitlement loomed like a massive Citgo sign.

I am not denigrating this Red Sox team. I did not boo David Ortiz minutes before his miraculous home run. I was not affronted when the Red Sox lost the division, lost three games, and finally lost the ALCS, all to a manifestly better team. Job never did curse God; many Sox fans, however, have not even waited for the second cow to perish.

Let us hope this loss will restore some of the lost virtue to Red Sox fans. For an immediate boost in character, however, I suggest becoming a follower of our beloved New York Mets.

Welcome to The Ennobler

2008-10-15T14:12:00.000-04:00

The Ennobler is a blog designed to provide commentary on politics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, literature, ethics and even athletics.

We do not necessarily seek to create a forum for the support of free markets, individual autonomy, legal textualism, metaphysical truth or empirical verification. Our brand of conservatism will be dignified only if it deserves to be. Meanwhile, we seek to ennoble that which is worth ennobling.

Join us.