Should we start calling post-modern conservatives Observation Deck Republicans? Plumb Liner David Schaengold has his first post up on the League, in which he suggests that the skyscraper may be our modern cathedral:
The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.
I was initially skeptical. While the medieval cathedral was an expression of the ethic of a whole culture, the skyscraper is a Randian obelisk built for service to a single dominant class. David, however, insightfully discovers both democratic spirit and humility in the observation deck:
Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below.
In the comments, Rufus F. asks if the mall may be a similarly important symbol of our age. Another possibility is the one suggested by Barthes, who made this case for the car as cathedral:
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object .. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The D.S. – the “Goddess” – has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Deesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.
One of the most suggestive things about Barthes’ view is that his cathedral is not a building. An age that finds its embodiment in a mode of transportation is one that seeks to annihilate space and distance, what Walter Benjamin called “overcoming the uniqueness of every reality.” I think the experience David describes on the skyscraper is part of this. Maybe it’s just because I’m afraid of heights, but I’m less likely to find Christian joy at the top of the skyscraper and more likely to find the demon of modernity. The view from the top of the skyscraper is so far beyond human dimension that it carries that sublime feeling of power and danger one might feel while hurtling down the freeway. Of course, looking down from the observation deck is bound to be attractive to both the masses and the elites in our modern age. I, for one, think I’ll stay planted on my front porch.
-Matthew Schmitz
Via the Reticulator, I found this post about an article I commented on last week:
Schrager and his partner set up their first nightclub, in Queens, for $27,000. The more famous Studio 54 — or is that “infamous”? — went up for $400,000.
“Now,” says Schrager, a major real estate developer, “with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards . . . before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.”
And it’s not just disco that’s suffered. It’s worth remembering one sad side effect of all the red tape cities and states put up to new enterprises. It leaves the private sector desperate to focus on the surest forms of wealth generation, less able to serve niche markets. Like discos.
I view this as yet another example of the ongoing rapprochement between conservatism and that most fabulous of dance crazes.
-Matthew Schmitz
I think Chris Dierkes (who is otherwise right-on) concedes too much when he says that Bill Murray is “hip” in some of his movies. Sure, Murray starred in several relentlessly stylish films, but his character is almost always distinctly uncool (think Raleigh St. Clair, or, for that matter, Steve Zissou). In no film is Murray presented to the viewer as a paragon of cool in the way a Brad Pitt of Johnny Depp might be. This point is usually lost on haters of Wes Anderson: the films are very very hip, yes, but they ultimately invite us to sympathize with characters too weak and vulnerable to support an aura of cool.
-Matthew Schmitz
For me the word “pad” is most immediately and vividly associated with helicopter landings, floating lillies, and the totally sweet places where bachelors live. Feminene hygiene products don’t really enter into it. When I was in college, I briefly worked for something called Wordnet, a project at Princeton University that seeks to create a comprehensive dictionary based on how people associate words. For example, “light” and “dark” are strong associations, as are “green” and “money” or (at least until recently) “Brad” and “Angelina.” If someone had presented me with the combination of “pad” and, um, you-know-what while I was working for Wordnet, the association in my mind would have been almost zero. Shows how much I know about how the other half lives.
A lot of people think Steve Jobs and co. were as clueless as I was, but I think there’s another possibility. While they may have underestimated the potential reaction, they must have had at least some idea of how women would initially hear the name. In a world where corporations span borders and, in the case of Apple, command loyalties as intense as any country, they perhaps thought that they could change such a powerful resonance. Their belief in Apple’s sterling brand and incredibly successful marketing was so unshakable that they thought they could overthrow the associations the word already had.
The iPad story is not about whether Steve Jobs employs enough women, but rather about how one of the world’s greatest brands foundered on the rock of culture. Long-standing mental associations, those things ingrained by experience in a world that is in some ways common to all and in others fractally diverse — the stuff of Wordnet — were too much for the marketing juggernaut and incredible self-confidence of one of the world’s most powerful corporations. In this sense, the iPad debacle is a victory of culture over corporate cult.
Update: Earlier I said that Brad and Jennifer were, until recently, associated. How could I say Jennifer when I meant Angelina?!
-Matthew Schmitz
I’m grateful for the comments by Matt Milliner and Commonweal editor Matt Boudway on my previous post on pro-life socialists. The first point I’d like to address is Matt B.’s claim that I am wrong to call Doug Kmiec an abortion apologist. Matt seems to think that I am simply reiterating Ross Douthat’s argument that Kmiec shilled for Obama. I’m actually going much further. The sad truth is that Kmiec’s support for Obama has led him to compromise the most fundamental pro-life principles. Take the following passage from Kmiec’s book Can a Catholic Support Him? in which Kmiec defends Obama’s vote against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act:
So what does the ‘Born Alive’ Act do? Largely, it redefines what it means to be ‘born alive.’ From the time of ancient common law, ‘born alive’ has meant live birth at or near the end of a full term pregnancy with a reasonable prospect of survival. If a woman sadly miscarries earlier and expels a nonviable, but temporarily alive, unborn child with a transient heartbeat, there isn’t a county recorder in the country who would record a live birth. The miscarriage is sad enough; we don’t worsen it with the grief of death before life has meaningfully taken hold. But that’s what the ‘Born Alive’ Act does. For the most part, it redefines live birth to include nonviable unborns who lack any meaningful chance of survival. (pg. 65)
For Kmiec, a child with a “transient heartbeat” that lacks a “meaningful” chance of survival cannot even be said to have been born: the mother unceremoniously “expels” it from her womb. What does it mean to say that life has not “meaningfully taken hold,” and who is Kmiec to say when it has? Kmiec’s words reject the truth that the pro-life movement has asserted for decades, namely, that every life has equal dignity regardless of duration or condition of disability.
Given the evidence I cite above, it’s hard for me to see why any magazine that claims to be pro-life would tolerate an association with Kmiec. If it’s all the same, I’d rather not debate the reprehensible views of our man in Malta. His twisted, misty logic has made him very hard to take seriously, and the most charitable response may be to dismiss him entirely.
Going back to Matt B.’s comment, I’d like to endorse his smart critique of single-issue voting and comments on pro-life liberalism. The liberal defense of life has an estimable legacy beautifully represented by the career of the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. However far right he moved, he always viewed life issues through the eyes of a liberal. Matt and I would probably agree that liberal arguments for compassion, inclusion, and justice will remain powerful weapons for the pro-life cause.
What is more controversial, and what I still believe, is that leftist arguments against the industrial exploitation of embryos will become increasingly important (and necessary) in the fight for life. Whatever that means long-term, I tend to agree with Matt Milliner’s comment that such arguments will, for the time being, find more of a home in conservative circles than they will in liberal ones.
-Matthew Schmitz
Via Schaengold, I thought these photos of pro-life French socialists were great:
Another one of their signs said, “Le capitalisme c’est la mort. La revolucion c’est la vie.” Stiff stuff, but it’s telling that these people look so exotic to American eyes.
The reason, I think, is that today America has no socially conservative left worthy of the name. Take magazines like Commonweal or Sojourners. They have many good people working for them, of course, but most of their prominent representatives–people like Jim Wallis and Doug Kmiec–are various kinds of abortion apologists. Instead of calling for revolution and opposing capitalistic abortion practices, they spend most of their time justifying the pro-big business, anti-life Democratic Party.
A few blue dogs are better: people like Bart Stupak but not, alas, my own senator, Ben Nelson. Maybe the closest to the ideal of these French marchers is Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, a Republican and leading pro-lifer whose leftist views on economic and fiscal issues prompted Tom Delay to strip him of his committee chair.
Leftist rhetoric is likely to become more important to the pro-life movement as things like fetal farming and the industrial use of embryos become more prevalent. One possibility I can see would be the Front Porch Republic spawning a new kind of Pro-life left, one that takes the Christian socialist critique of a William Morris or John Ruskin and weds it to today’s concerns about bailouts, abortion and motorcycle repair. Procreons sans entraves!
-Matthew Schmitz
In her typically illuminating First Things article on the decline of mainline Protestantism, Mary Eberstadt made one point that I thought needed a little prodding. Eberstadt blames the Anglican Church’s retreat on traditional sexual ethics to a misguided compassion: “Exactly as had happened with divorce, the Anglican okaying of contraception was born largely of compassion for human frailty…”
Though Eberstadt does not say as much, this formulation seems to lay the blame for the change squarely at the feet of liberals, who, as David Schaengold once noted, are perhaps most distinguished by their rhetorical emphasis on compassion. (Conservatives, meanwhile, are distinguished by a rhetoric of toughness.) But is compassionate goo-gooing really the main cause of the transformation in sexual morals?
Eberstadt’s own article suggests that compassion wasn’t the only emotion behind the change. Seeming stalwarts like Billy Graham okayed the pill to counter the “terrifying and tragic” problem of overpopulation. Indeed, many people were simply motivated by fear of overpopulation, poverty, and the menace of “less desirable” races out-reproducing whites. What was more significant, ultimately, than the emotions behind the decision was a typically modern faith in technical control, here applied to the body through the mechanism of the pill. The impulse to tame and battle nature turned inward as man aspired to regulate his own (or, in the case of contraception, her own) bodily functions.
It might make more sense to describe the reaction to the pill as progressive rather than liberal, since it combined dissatisfaction about present conditions with a faith in technical control and “solutions” to social “problems.” The fact that this reaction was shared by very nearly everyone indicates to what an extent the “progressive” reaction was, simply, the modern one. A belief in technical control, not a tendency to compassion, is Eberstadt’s real culprit.
-Matthew Schmitz
Poulos writes:
“Who more than the tea partiers favors small businesses? The idea that the tea partiers long only to ’stop things’ is so juvenile and crude that it hardly merits comment. But Friedman uses that idea to contrast a vision of real productive growth driven by individuals taking charge of their own destinies, which — last time I checked — is precisely the positive agenda that all tea partiers, regardless of sect or faction, tend to promote. Only a pundit like Friedman, however, could blind himself to this actuality, intent as he is on realizing in American practice what his beloved Chinese government has made possible only in theory: the marriage of ancient Egyptian despotism with the modern dynamism of Hong Kong. Only the government, you see, has the extraordinary, unilateral power necessary to breed and launch a million innovators!”
Isn’t there some worry that Friedman might be right? That we’ve reached precisely that stage of history where innovation requires despotism? Hence all the articles about the future of Authoritarian Capitalism. In which case despotism would still be despotism and liberty still liberty, but Friedman, while wrong to prefer despotism, would be right in a technical way. And of course the friends of liberty would in that case face a much more diabolical foe than the Mustache of Understanding.
Later:
The folly of Friedmanesque thinking is in its privileging of economics over politics. It cannot conceive of liberty politically, as an end. It can only contemplate liberty economically, as a means.
This folly hardly seems unique to Friedman. Isn’t it shared by most thinkers about what we now call politics? Is this the same as the Front-Porch critique of the GWB “go shopping” moment or the persistent reference to American citizens as “consumers”?
-David Schaengold
The story begins:
On a winter evening, Romanova was returning with her beloved Staffordshire terrier from a visit to a designer who specialises in kitting out canine Muscovites in the latest fashions. The terrier was sporting a new green camouflage jacket as he walked with his owner through the crowded Mendeleyevskaya metro station. There they encountered Malchik, a black stray who had made the station his home, guarding it against drunks and other dogs. Malchik barked at the pair, defending his territory. But instead of walking away, Romanova reached into her pink rucksack, pulled out a kitchen knife and, in front of rush-hour commuters, stabbed Malchik to death.
The station’s commuters pooled money to erect a statue of Malchik. This being Russia, his death reflects a history of political upheaval:
“This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.
The rest is here.
-Matthew Schmitz
In Vanity Fair’s story about disco culture, Nona Hendryx (of “Lady Marmalade” fame) talks about what came after the closing of Studio 54:
Where did the dancers go? They went to the gym. It became the new club. That’s where people started meeting people, started hanging out. They were trying to make themselves look healthier and better, they were playing music, they had dance classes.
If gyms are the discotheques of our day, ours is a pretty joyless, self-absorbed, and salty-sweet smelling day. On the other hand, one need only mention drugs and AIDs to be reminded of the downside of the discos. But gyms? Can’t you do better, America?
-Matthew Schmitz
There is no riddle of existence that cannot be resolved, or robbed of its sting, in a David Brooks column. We are lucid now, and efficient; we are the quickest studies who ever lived. We throw no shadows. We know how things really work. We have the definite measure of everything. (Happiness, for example, is defined for us by social science; is an objective of public policy). Even as we cozily admit our fallibility, we exempt nothing from our brilliance. We dispel inwardness with our analysis of it. Hurriedly and without any suspicion that precious things are being driven away, we march smartly through all the pains and all the perplexities, and we call this dream of transparency, this aspiration to control, this denial of finitude, reason.
-Leon Wieseltier
I narrowly missed being one of the unlucky travelers delayed by the security breach at Newark’s Terminal C last week. (If you were one of them, you may want to stop reading.) I don’t envy the stranded travelers, but the “airport kiss,” with all its attendant delays and incalculable public expense, may be the single most beautiful event of the year. Rutgers graduate student Haisong Jiang, 28, made his (still anonymous) lover our modern Helen: the face that grounded a thousand planes.
The Times’ City Room blog compared the two lovers to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The comparison that springs to my mind is Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift in Terminal Station. In that film, two lovers are forced to say goodbye in Rome’s Stazioni Termini. The station itself is the main character, its Fascist-designed spaces alternately confining their love or exposing it to the elements. The film’s director, Vittoria di Sica, interrupts the love story by showing people from all levels of Italian society–peasants, tourists, paparazzi, the president. The station becomes the Italian state, a state that makes no room for the two lovers.
So what does the airport kiss tell us about our state? I’m not quite sure. While I think Jiang should be punished harshly, there is a real value to his careless caresses. They puncture a climate of paranoia and remind us that despite the graphic shock of body scans, not all public displays are permitted. I don’t like our security bureaucracy. It strikes me as nasty but necessary. Which may be why I’m encouraged to know that it is as vulnerable to love’s folly as it is to calculated malice.
-Matthew Schmitz
This is a good idea:
A new computerized, scannable fare card would allow New York City Transit to charge passengers different prices depending on the time of day
Charging passengers more to ride the subway when it’s crowded and less when it’s not makes sense, just like it makes sense to charge drivers to use crowded roads. In both cases there are some transaction costs that have to be accounted for, of course — establishing a tolling system for roads and creating a variable-fare system that isn’t too complex for transit — but in both cases, price should be regulating peak demand, not the opportunity cost of time lost in traffic or the unpleasantness of jamming yourself into a thicket of strangers.
Sadly, it looks as though the MTA has ruled out charging more for peak rides, which would help relieve the overcrowding at rush hour. Even so, charging less at off-peak hours will be a net gain for the system’s riders. But why not go all the way and make the subway free when it’s not being heavily used?
Update: Charles Komanoff at Streetsblog does some great analysis of one possible variable-fare structure.
-David Schaengold
It’s great to see one of my all-time favorite redevelopment projects discussed online. I like Nouvel’s contribution (Gasometer A) the best, predictably.
-David Schaengold
David, you say that:
“no one has taken what seems to me the correct position: loss of innovation be damned, we have a positive obligation to provide some level of basic health care to everyone in our society, since we can afford to do so.”
Isn’t almost the exact opposite the case? Nearly everyone, left or right, would agree with that rather elastic statement, and I daresay everyone at both First Things and Commonweal would. Does the principle simply require that we provide emergency-room care and a few other basic services? Or do we need cradle-to-grave provision for every medical need and more than a few medical whims?
There are good rhetorical and political reasons to not talk about the sacrifices required under any settlement. It’s fine if some people do, it may even be helpful, but it makes little sense to attack people for not setting flame to their own political causes.
I don’t know where the correct course on healthcare lies, but almost everyone already has a claim on the principle you just put up for adoption.
-Matthew Schmitz
The Plumbliners have mostly refrained from adding yet more amateur opinions to the health-care debate. I hope our readers have noted and appreciated this display of intellectual virtue. A strange feature of the debate I do feel qualified to comment upon has been the relative absence of moral philosophizing in the discussion. Leftists seem to be suggesting that we can have our cake and eat it: universal coverage at reduced individual and national expense, with minimal loss of innovation. Conservatives have a different analysis, suggesting that federal obligations will balloon and innovation will collapse. Which side has it right is not at all apparent to me. I’m surprised, however, that no one has taken what seems to me the correct position: loss of innovation be damned, we have a positive obligation to provide some level of basic health care to everyone in our society, since we can afford to do so. Even if this means that we use the same treatments in 2050 as today, accepting the obviously huge opportunity cost to general welfare. Clearly the utilitarians would tear their hair out about how immoral it would be to privilege the poor we have with us now over against the citizens of 2050, but that no utilitarians have yet torn their hair out in the debate is a symptom of how degraded our political discourse has become.
It’s not surprising that this position hasn’t been articulated, though it’s disappointing, since something like it is very close to obligatory for Catholics. Suggesting that the right thing to do might also be costly is anathema in American politics these days, the Left gains nothing by allowing for the possibility that health care reform might be a disaster for general welfare, and the Right effectively does not recognize collective moral responsibility for the poor. Still, it might be a nice thing to hear from First Things or Commonweal, instead of arguments about exactly to what extent one may ignore what is written in social encyclicals.
-David Schaengold
Stefan McDaniel lodges some serious objections to sites like this one:
Reading Postman for the first time last month gave me clearer language to explain my rage against the rise of blogging. For what he says about media can be said about literary forms—they are biased toward certain kinds of content. The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.
Blogging has broadened the public discussion, but being more “democratic” does not somehow make it a neutral or indifferent forum. The medium, unsurprisingly, has its biases, and certain people are better suited to blogospherics than others. While vicious habits of mind are often the best recipe for drawing traffic, good blogging — blogging that is likely to gain the approval of “young fogeys” like McDaniel — requires intellectual virtue. Daniel Larison’s long, thoughtful posts are a good example of using the form to cultivate good mental habits. This model — call it anti-blogging — deserves more imitators.
Update: I should also say what our readers hopefully already know: the League has some of the best “anti-blogging” around.
-Matthew Schmitz
A few of the subjects covered:
7. …How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?
8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Sign me up.
(via Kottke)
-Matthew Schmitz
David Schaengold
Keith Staples
Matthew Schmitz
P. Langdale Hough
Michael E. van Landingham
