OH CINEMA, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN? Some very quick notes on a few of the movies I've watched demi-recently.

The Cockettes: You can find out why I wanted to watch this documentary about an avant-garde hippie-esque drag group here--the Geerdes quote is great. I think I tried to use it in the Weekly Standard once but they scrubbed it.... The movie is a labor of love, but if you weren't there you probably don't care about the ramshackle performances, and the era's darker tints are either excused (constant stealing, preference for welfare over work, general self-centeredness) or treated much too glancingly (deaths, sex and parenting, the alleyways people ran down in the search for ecstasy). Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary, which I saw a bit later, did a generally better job of actually talking about punk (and s/m, and drugs, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting...) as part of a search for something beyond the self. Even Rise Above gave very little attention to that topic, obviously the angle most interesting to me. But I also just liked lead singer Lynn Breedlove a lot more than I liked any of the Cockettes; maybe it's just her scraped-up, cadging, laughing, low-rent voice. I think Tribe 8 was the second concert I ever went to (the first was the Violent Femmes opening for the B-52s).

A Letter to Three Wives: Desperate Housewives of the 1950s. I mean that in a good way! A really well-done "women's picture" about married life, with a surprising absence of children and an unusual, souffle-light mix of candor and utopianism about class.

The Lost Weekend: Sickly, and then sickly-sweet, melodrama. Was I just born too late for this? Only intermittently seemed to capture the shame and disintegration of addiction.

Silent Hill: Love the scabby, rancid color scheme of this movie. Love the idea that the deserted, fog-shrouded and frightening "daytime" Silent Hill is actually the happy version--it gets much worse! Found the last half-hour or so speechifying and boring. Another of the seemingly endless "evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!" horror movies. I could really use fewer of those--obviously it isn't entirely untrue, but when it's pushed relentlessly as the only explanation for cruelty or, as it is in Silent Hill, used to reject the possibility of forgiveness and allow the audience to wallow in vengeance, then I find it really cheap.

28 Weeks Later: Starts out really powerfully, focusing on the horrible choices made during a zombie apocalypse and the need to come to terms with those choices somehow after the immediate crisis has passed. I was super invested in this "Where did they bury the survivors?" story and was disappointed that overall that isn't the story this movie wants to tell. Still, it's fast-paced and compelling, maybe more of a suspense flick than the misery-horror show I was hoping for.

WHY WE LISTEN TO SAD MUSIC WHEN WE'RE SAD:

...It's counterintuitive, but Johnson's story suggests that the desolation in Schostakovich's music, resonating with the desolation in their hearts, served to bolster the spirits of the Russian populace at the time. The premise postulated by Johnson and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who co-hosted the event, is the oft-repeated idea that music, by conferring a narrative structure to emotion, brings emotion closer to thought. "There is something about seeing your own mood reflected that allows you to let go of that feeling," says Johnson.

But it is not so simple. As Tallis, who was standing in for an absent Robert Winston, pointed out at the start of the evening's conversation, there is a complex interplay between the emotion the composer attempts to write into the music, that conveyed by the music, the listener's interpretation, and the listener's mood. This was resoundingly reflected in the results of an experiment carried out on the evening's audience.

more (via the Rattus)

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll didn't get placed in a timely fashion. I've decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on whether or not to include the bits specific to this production, but ended up keeping them in, since this was not only the best Stoppard I've seen by far but the best Studio Theatre production I've seen by far. I want you guys to know that they can really knock it out of the park.
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Now that Europe’s “short 20th century,” 1914 – 1989, is over, everyone’s fighting over who gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet empire. How much to Gorbachev, how much to Reagan, how much to John Paul II?

Into this reverse-ostrakon of historical popularity, Tom Stoppard has thrown an unexpected name: the Great God Pan.

His play Rock ’n’ Roll, in an intimate production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre through June 21, dramatizes the clash between the “cultural Left” and the more strictly political Left in the last half of the Cold War. Yet all the play’s oppositions--culture vs. politics, eros vs. reason, soul vs. matter--are embodied in the complex relationships between finely-drawn, resonant characters. The sentimentality which sometimes mars Stoppard’s work is absent. It’s a comedy, and a love song, but its joys and reconciliations are hard-won.

Studio’s actors are completely engaging, and the small theater space makes everything immediate: You can smell the joss-sticks. It is weird sitting quietly, occasionally clapping, as the actors explore the ecstatic release of a great guitar riff. There’s no way around that, given the bourgeois nature of just about any American audience who would come to see a Stoppard play. But the play is good enough to overcome our habitual complacence.

The first scene presents Great Pan in the unlikely form of Syd Barrett, crouching on a stoned hippie teen girl’s garden wall. We then set up the tension which will define the play: It is 1968 and Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. In Cambridge, half-feral British Communist Max is growling at half-dissident Czech Jan, as Jan decamps for home: “I said, ‘You. I’ll take you,’ because you were serious and you knew your Marx… and at the first flutter of a Czech flag you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.” Max does offer the self-consciously ironic machismo of apologizing to Jan “about the tanks.”

Max is a bitter-ender: “Why do people go on as if there’s a danger we might forget Communism’s crimes, when the danger is we’ll forget its achievements?” He feels piercingly the humiliation of his position:

I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he’s fascinated by me. He’s never met a Communist before. I’m like the last white rhino.

(One of the many subtle touches in this play is the way Max’s rationalism lands him in cruelly absurd situations.) His materialism gives no quarter to fuzzy-headed talk of “inspiration” or “soul”: The meat is all there is. This belief gets one of the funniest smackdowns in a very funny play, when his wife’s student Lenka says he believes a human is a “pinball machine which thinks it’s in love.” But Max also gets one of the play’s most wrenching lines, after his wife accuses him and his materialism of collaboration with the cancer which is killing her.

Max is the sort of man who says, “A worker’s state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work.” Max’s marriage lasts until his wife’s death. He’s the Communist bourgeois.

Jan, meanwhile, just wants to listen to his records. His return to Czechoslovakia is something of a road-not-taken for Stoppard: As the playwright explains, “He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.” Back behind the Iron Curtain, Jan spends his time playing rock music, maneuvering around the police, and arguing against politics. The cops force all his employers to fire him, then arrest him for being a “parasite”--in a pointed callback to an earlier scene in which Jan praised British freedoms, and Max snapped that in England “everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.”

Here again materialism matters, though the play doesn’t hammer it home. A cop can hit you in the face. A cop can bash in your head. A cop can control the meat. If, as the anti-Nazi resistance song says, “Thoughts are free,” it is only because there is something irreducible, a soul which can’t be destroyed by hitting it.

This is part of the importance of the recurring pagan metaphors. As Eleanor, Max’s wife, translates Sappho for a student: “Eros is amachanon, he’s spirit as opposed to machinery, Sappho is making the distinction. He’s not naughty, he’s--what? Uncontrollable. Uncageable.”

At first Jan and Ferdinand are sharply opposed in their ways of existing under totalitarianism. Jan accuses Ferdinand of “moral exhibitionism” for his constant petitions and protests. Jan argues that his rock musicians--preeminently the Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe--have found a deeper form of rebellion against tyranny:

FERDINAND: Who’s got the best chance of getting Husak’s attention--Havel or the Plastic People of the Universe?
JAN: The Plastics.

At first Ferdinand is exasperated. After he meets the Plastics’ impresario in prison, however, he comes to Jan with convert’s fervor:

FERDINAND: He explained about the hair. The tempter says, “Cut your hair just a little, and we’ll let you play.” Then the tempter says, “Just change the name of the band and you can play.” And after that, “Just leave out this one song”…. It is better not to start by cutting your hair, Jirous said--no, it is necessary. Then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country. Why couldn’t you have explained this?

This play is passionate about the transformative power of music--the moral force of joy. But it is not naïve. Stoppard hints that perhaps rock’s transformative power is not the same in the liberated West as in the repressed Eastern Bloc: Although Jan’s line, fairly early in the play that “the Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics” gets a laugh, by the play’s end the primary representative of Western rock is the aging Syd Barrett, shambling through the eternal present of late-stage drug addiction. And one of the sharpest exchanges in the play is this one, toward the very end:

MAX: There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day…. What happened to it?
JAN: If pornography was available, the poetry would have sold like poetry in the West.

The last time the gods are mentioned, Lenka is in Cambridge, as a student of her own reads from Plutarch: “…and Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore--Great Pan is dead!” The play ends in the Czech Republic, because it has to, because the joy of liberation depends on who’s liberated from what. It’s possible to read the play’s gentle ending as a statement that the time of the gods has passed, and we are now in a time of humanity. But even this is a much too reductive reading of a play which is, like the ecstatic soul, irreducible.

SOME SUNNY DAY: If you live in or near DC, I can tell you one thing you need to do right now: Go and fetch yourself a ticket to the Studio Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll. I haven't been blown away by other Stoppard I've seen, but this thing is just fantastic on every level. I'll be reviewing it, so I'll say more then, but... it's about the Velvet Revolution, and ethics vs. Dionysos, and the materialism of dialectical materialism, and... it's really funny, and it earns its ending. Dooooooo eeeeeeeet.

I CAN TIE A KNOT IN A CHERRY STEM: Comics review. So everyone who knows me knows I couldn't resist the paperback copy of Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle. This is the early '80s story arc in which our hero, Iron Man, gained an origin and an addiction. I loved it with a deeply stupid love.

The covers are so bad. The front cover is basically, "John Romita, Jr. Presents: THE HUMAN THIGH!", and then the back cover is AA Werewolf.

And... I don't know a good way to put this. All Iron Man origin stories are racist. Iron Man is a white guy who experienced an epiphany in a country full of brown people, and then he came home to be important and have his own comic book title, and sometimes his black sidekick got to tag along. Honestly, there's no defending it. There are a lot of things I like about the Iron Man mythos, but I don't recommend it, for exactly the same reason that I don't say everybody should read Gone with the Wind.

So okay, that said... I thought this book was surprisingly clever and fun and (on a scale of negative-1000 to negative-100) subtle. I really enjoyed this. The art was action-comics standard, but the pacing worked, and the dialogue was what you wanted '80s comics to be, rather than what you just kind of accepted as the '80s comics norm.

I can't recommend this in good conscience. But if you are pretty sure you want the first Tony Stark alcoholism arc, I can tell you this version of it is a lot better than it had to be. It really isn't lugubrious or pro-forma the way future Tony-drunk comics can seem. And if you liked the movie, I can say that this comic is similar, for good and for ill.

Narrator: You are entering the realm which is unusual. Maybe it's magic or contains some kind of monster. The second one. Prepare to enter... The Scary Door. Please send a man 'round back and pick up Clyde Smith, a professional gambler who's about to have an unfortunate accident.

Clyde Smith: [Smith is run over by a car, then awakes in a casino. He plays the slot machine and wins] Ha-ha-ha! A casino where I'm winning? That car must've killed me. I must be in heaven!

[wins again]

Clyde Smith: A casino where I always win. That's boring. I must really be... in HELL!
--Futurama (it then does a shout-out to "Gremlin on the Wing"! Love.)

[...] the devouring gorgon romantic love, toward which, as toward wine, unfaith is renewal
--Marianne Moore, as excerpted here

AND OUR STORY SHALL BE THE EDUCATION OF OUR HEROES: Some thoughts about those posts about eros and education.

First, and most importantly!, a correspondent tells me that Yale's focus on extracurrics and relative insouciance about course/section hours is not nearly as exotic as I'd thought. Go find out if this is true at your campus!

THIS IS THE ONLY STORY I WILL EVER BE ABLE TO TELL: And second, keep in mind that all of my opinions about everything were forged in a genuine philosophical community. I don't promote underage drinking because I think the usual dance-and-vomits or DKE watch-your-drink parties have anything to recommend them. When I talk about drinking, I always and only mean drinking in the company of people who are dedicated to philosophy, to pursuit of the femme fatale Truth. Wine (and by wine, I mean cheap vodka) is one of the easiest recruits for the philosophers' army, and so I praise her, but if you don't follow Sophia's flag you should probably just stay sober.

This same context applies to my comments about chastity. What I'm saying makes sense in a community where leadership, and its erotics, serves to seduce freshmen into philosophy--where Diotima's ladder is as boringly obvious as the transition from sophomore year to junior. I don't know that I can make claims about how eros and education interact in contexts and campuses where they're estranged.

COURSE CREDIT IN THE STRAIGHT WORLD: On reflection I think that gay guys tended to have quite a bit more a) volatility in self-concept (less willingness to think of themselves as Good People/rational actors in a rational sexual arena/totally ethical and responsible and your parents will love me) and b) self-awareness, than most sexually-active straight people I knew in college.

B) is a huge part of why sex strikes me as different from other possible realms of cognitive dissonance. The point is not merely, "Some religions say sex out of wedlock is wrong!" The point is more, "There's a whole philosophical and cultural apparatus designed to promote the belief that sex out of wedlock is morally neutral, said apparatus would help you feel good, and this belief is so all-pervasive that you can swim in it like a fish in water, never even noticing the degree to which it may be shaping or constraining your own beliefs."

It doesn't help that the prevailing philosophical/cultural apparatus supporting "sex is morally neutral!" is based on a deeply banal understanding of sex and the body.

My guess is that the coming-out process forces a sense of the contingency of prevailing cultural norms around sex, and thus perhaps made the gay guys I knew a lot less complacent, a lot more willing to state forthrightly the ways in which their sexual activities had affected their worldviews, rather than--like so many straight undergrads--defensively denying that their sexual activity was in any way philosophically interesting or meaningful. The straights tended to seem so entitled about sex!--and so heavily invested in their own self-images as rational, responsible actors.

YOU WILL NOTE THE SAMPLE SIZE PROBLEM HERE. *g* I think I'm talking about, like, maybe six guys at this point! And again, all but one of them were POR members, thus within that eros/education model. AND, too, sexually-active POR members may be disproportionately likely to be libertarians, hence already prone to complacency and overinvestment in their own rationality!

...And, too, I may be bitter. Wouldn't be the first time! And yeah, I do realize that my judgments of other 20-year-olds are not the best examples of humility, or self-overhearing. My advice is always worth exactly what you paid for it!

SADDLE UP THE LLAMA, I'M GOING IN!: And finally, a reader writes (quite acutely):

Your comment "the cruel intensifying of drama I associated with sex really only took place in heterosexual couples" seems exactly right (to this straight guy at least). It raised this thought: the standard heterosexual relationship is morally problematic in a way the standard homosexual relationship is not. And this difference explains why ethical systems have an institution of marriage.

Heterosexual relationships are often, indeed typically, characterized by massive disparities -- differences in physical strength, level of and frequency of sexual desire, degree of emotional involvement, and, of course, the ultimate differential risk of pregnancy. We have ethical norms like marriage, like chivalry -- intensely powerful, civilization-shaping norms -- precisely because this relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. Leave aside any practical consequences (who takes care of the kids, etc.) these norms are essential for reliable moral behavior. Without them, people just inflict endless injustices and cruelties on each other. Homosexual relationships simply do not pose analogous problems. No one ever created 'homosexual marriage' or homosexual chivalry, because, by and large, no such institutions were needed.

Two conclusions:

a) At least one strand of opposition to gay marriage (I am a supporter, FWIW) should be "it's not you, it's us." You don't need these powerful norms -- you'll do just fine! Using a jackhammer to crush a walnut inevitably degrades the performance of the jackhammer. Can't we please find some other way to officially validate your lifestyle!

b) absent a teleology of the human body, we should admit that an active homosexual lifestyle is less morally problematic than an active heterosexual lifestyle. No risk of pregnancy. Lower average asymmetries in power, expectation, and emotional investment. Less likelihood of accidental deception. Better fit with contractual liberal models all around.

All for now! Write more, pumpkins!

EROS AND EDUCATION: I know this is ridiculously late, but I've been distracted and all August humid-hazy in the brain. Here are some clarifying comments I made to X. Trapnel of Books Do Furnish a Room, about our brief dust-up. (Me, him, me.)

1) "I totally agree [that it's still possible for people with radically divergent premises and even languages/definitions to pursue truth together], and I'm sorry this particular approach to meta-discussion didn't highlight that agreement. BUT--and this is why so much philosophy goes so wrong--good debate on morals & politics (I still prefer 'virtue' as the word for this stuff) can only take place when there's a rich context of story and persona. If I want to talk about marriage (to use the easiest example to hand) I need to talk about the Song of Songs, not just more abstract nouns, and I need to create some sense of my persona in your mind.

"That's necessary b/c persuasion is leadership. We need to create some kind of relationship in order for you to understand what I'm saying. Huckabee (or the rhetorical strategy I'm calling 'Huckabee'!) fails here b/c he basically rejects any attempt to create a relationship with people who don't already share his conclusions. That's ridiculous, it's retreat, just the opposite of leadership.

"This is why a) good philosophical dialogues are superior to good philosophical treatises, and b) just about all of the work that has to be done to 'resurrect' virtue-talk must be done at the level of culture, not politics as such. (So Huckabee/'Huckabee' was already quite handicapped.)"

2) "I think we disagree on what aesthetics is, and where its limits are. Possibly I can clarify by saying that I'm talking about aesthetics as a philosophy of love, not a philosophy of taste? [edit: Should be, not solely as a philosophy of taste.] I mean, I disagree with you about 'de gustibus' anyway, but I think you can keep believing that and still end up on my side here."

[note: Of course it's possible to dispute taste! The guys at Project Rungay do it all the time, and often convince one another or their readers.]

[and here I say that leadership is not only about showing people something new to love, but also about revealing the secret identity of the beloved for whom they're already longing:] "I'm very OK with showing people how their own longings (aesthetic!) are answered by my worldview."

THE VERY SHORT MIMES OF THE SNOW GODS DO NOT WISH AT ALL THAT THE VERY GREAT BURDEN OF DISTRIBUTING THE WINE OF THE WALLS WILL BE LIGHTENED IN THEIR LIFETIME.

Also, FKS is right that these recipes for happiness are worth reading (in order); and some of them would make nicely provocative debate resolutions....

RESURRECTED WORDS BATTLE ZOMBIE WORDS: So of course someone put his finger squarely on the weakness of my Parmenides/Huckabee post: What now?

Well, I want to say a few things. I'm going to do my thing first, because this is my blog, and then if I think it will help to respond to my interlocutor I'll do so; otherwise I'll yield the floor.

First: Does BDFAR actually disagree with my premise? That is, does he actually think that "reason" or "nature" or "happiness" or "pleasure" are either a) a basically uncontested category in American politics, or b) a good-enough basis for politics? I'm going to say that the first three are radically contested, and the fourth is a frankly gross basis for politics. Does he disagree?

I honestly don't know how you can look out your window and not think that virtues have become brain-eating zombie words. But if somebody wants to say, "Oh yes! We have all kinds of virtue beliefs in common, and those are the most important ones!", well shoot, I'd love to listen.

Second: Of course we do actually share an enormous amount in common. When I talk about marriage I can say "Song of Songs" and most people know what I mean. This is important for the next point, but it isn't really the same as having a cultural consensus on marriage, as--again--I think almost anyone would agree.

On the one hand, I want to beat up the leftist postmodernists with copies of Donald Davidson's "On the Very Notion of a Conceptual Scheme"--you really can't get away from Shakespeare, sweeties! (which is not at all what DD meant to say, because he's naive about language, but it's still kind of obviously true)--but on the other hand, of course, the Left arises out of the same tradition and the same facts about the world that produced Shakespeare, and is thereby almost as universal as he is. (Not quite as, because he's multivocal, while the Left by definition tends to flatten all voices into one voice. I'm sorry your philosophy arose after the Enlightenment screwed up philosophical practice. Desperately not my fault, though, y'all.)

[eta: Sorry!--that previous paragraph was not at all in direct response to BDFAR, and I wasn't assuming that he (?) is in any unusual or interesting way "on the left"; I don't know his political beliefs.]

Third, and most excitingly: All anyone can ever do is present descriptions of how persuasion happens. This meta-discussion is vastly less interesting (and likely less fruitful philosophically) than simply persuading; but every now and then maybe it has to happen.

So here's what Huckabee should do, a.k.a. what everyone should do.

Get on your hands and knees. Humbly feel around for shared premises. Listen, listen quickly!

Talk about why you believe what you believe, in terms which you think might be persuasive to people who don't already agree. This ridiculously basic step is the one Huckabee missed, of course. He was a Rortyan without a secular canon--Rorty writes as though of course we all draw the same lessons he drew from Western lit, and Huckabee shows the same naivete about the Bible. I'm not sure which of them comes across as more provincial: Rorty with his canon which can never get outside the boundaries set by some projected self-shadow he called Nabokov, or Huckabee with his Bible which can never get outside the boundaries set by the Washington Times. Neither one of them exemplifies self-overhearing, to be frank.

So yeah--feel around, on your hands and knees, for words. If you find a word that might work, pick it up and wave it around and see where it catches the light: sublimity, beauty, honor. Maybe people who are allergic to talk of good and bad, or wrong and right, can hear those words when the light glints off them just right.

Eventually I think you should look for the light source; but then, I would say that, and I don't think it's a desperately useful thing to say in this conversation. For the moment let's just go with feeling around on the floor, listening, feeling with your palms until some shard of something really hurts. Pick that thing up. Look at that thing. That's the thing your culture teaches you to avoid. That's something worth looking at.

Fourth: To resurrect a word, you need to be a leader. That's actually the definition of leadership: resurrecting a word for a community.

John Keegan's Mask of Command is the most profound study of leadership I've read; the only other option is Plato's Symposium. Philosophy cannot proceed--maybe ever, but certainly in our day--without leadership, and therefore it cannot proceed without authority.

Where do words take meaning? From our culture, from our wants? From our beloveds? Or perhaps from some other--some Other--who pushes somehow beyond self and culture and beloved?

Philosophy, as eros, is precisely the eros for this other option, this hidden god, this Other. Apollo yearns for Dionysos, always, always.

Thus every resurrected word will lead--if we follow her--back to her tomb and then to her Savior.

ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP: PARMENIDES AND HUCKABEE BATTLE THE BLOB!: This very good post by Ryan Anderson is an opportunity for me to finally explain what I meant by saying that all culture rests on religion, “and by religion I mean an understanding of the nature of love”; and culture can't be separated from politics.

It’s pretty easy to jump from that statement to Huckabee’s, “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do--to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”

I think it’s fairly boring to say, “I don’t want conversion by the sword.” It’s unjustifiable on Christian grounds (sorry, St. Augustine, for the most part I think you’re the squiggly neon shoelaces of the world and I love you to little sparkly bits, but that wasn’t your finest hour) and, really, after JPII and his insistence on the rights of conscience, do we still need to have this discussion? So I will bracket it, because this is my blog, and instead talk about the ways in which Huckabee is right, and Richard Rorty is right, and Alisdair MacIntyre is right--because these are three guys I would far prefer to use as scratching posts, so defending them will be an exercise in humility.

All natural-law talk is virtue-talk at heart. Certainly in the realm of politics this is true. There are some things Reason can’t explain; for everything else, there’s natural law. If you believe anything remotely close to that, you are a virtue-talker.

MacIntyre is right on two counts: First, that virtue-talk is necessary to translate religion (“an understanding of the nature of love”) into politics and culture. Second, that virtue-talk has broken down in our culture, and is merely a threadbare proxy for much more fundamental clashes of worldviews.

These two things are both true because virtues are names. I don’t mean that virtues have names. I mean that virtues, in both the cultural and the political arena, are names. If I say that a certain behavior is “dishonorable,” of course everyone nowadays asks, “By what standard of honor?” So too with “chaste,” so too with “cruel,” so too with “courageous,” so too with everything. Marriage, fidelity, kindness, justice--no noun can stand on the solid ground of universally-acknowledged meaning nowadays.

And therefore our Constitution cannot stand on that ground either. If you think I’m wrong… define “cruel and unusual punishment.” Every word in that phrase except “and” is not merely contested as a matter of political practice, but contested as a matter of basic, irreconcilable philosophical and theological worldview.

In other words: If the Eighth Amendment has meaning, rather than being a fight club of not merely competing but mutually exclusive meanings, then it must have meaning in reference to some underlying Truth which infuses meaning into our words “cruel” and “unusual” and “punishment.”

If the One is not, then nothing is.

Plato’s Parmenides is right that all of Socrates’ vaunted Forms rested on some underlying conception of reality: the One. Without some kind of consensus--however limited--on the One, no Form made sense.

Huckabee is right that without some underlying cultural consensus on basic definitions of justice, mercy, rights, marriage, compassion, cruelty, and even reason itself, whose definition is anything but obvious, we cannot possibly have a coherent national politics. Politics is a conversation punctuated with gunfire. If we don’t even understand the words the other side is speaking, the gunfire will of necessity get more frequent, and the conversation less so.

Rorty is right that there’s a way out, and that way is aesthetic in nature. When the Good and the True have collapsed into a hundred muttering and squabbling goblins; when the One is a longed-for rag of memory no more puissant than Prester John; still the Beautiful and--one hopes even more so--the Sublime call to us.

This is why the ultimate political evil of our age isn't cruelty, and isn’t even selfishness. The ultimate political evil of our age is sentimentality, which leaches the meaning from meaningful things; or, to use its secret name, banality.