Of Greens and Garbage

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as its excrement - not just the sheer amount of material stuff that we throw away, but the figurative garbage, the outdated technology and appliances, that piles up in our closets or basements.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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Other PT

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

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

The Daily Heideggerian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Whimsical Fancy

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


Spuds McKenzie, eat your little canine heart out.

Restore the "Pinafore"

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

The Ennobler Office Pool

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

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

Oh Dirtmaier where art thou?

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

Capacity for generosity

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

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

Confession and the Reality of Sin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generosity Without Capacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trading in trays for a day

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

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

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

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

The Last Remaining Clinton Supporter

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

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

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

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

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

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

When is a Jesuit not a Jesuit?

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

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

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

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

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

Your move, Samuel.

Friar Fanatic

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

Congratulations Matt Lasko

Well done sir.

Bravo Battier

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

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

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

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

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