"ALLAN BLOOM'S GUIDE TO COLLEGE." I did not expect the New Yorker to publish the sharpest thing I've read so far about the Closing of the American Mind anniversary!

For kids entering college fully trained in this liturgy of prudence and niceness, which I am anxiously imparting to my own young children, it’s not Bloom’s censoriousness they will resist. It’s his decadence.

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Also, this phrasing is just self-parodically Straussian: "I’m not a Straussian, but I was taught by Straussians and modelled my classroom methods on theirs...."

OCCAM'S RAZOR IS THE WORST RAZOR! Some thoughts on revisiting The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, which has been revived at the DCJCC's Theater J and will play through April 1. My review of the original production is here, so these are just some scattered additional notes. (Oh, and here's a post about a Philadelphia production, over at The Groom's Family!)

First, the play is still fantastic, Alexander Strain is still ridiculously compelling despite playing a guy who is kind of a jackass (albeit a jackass under unbearable pressure), and they've toned down the cartoonishness of Rebecca a bit, which I doubt will pacify the people who didn't like her character the first time around.

I still don't understand why Spinoza is so in love with simplicity. Why is a belief, a God, a proposition, or an argument better because it is simpler than other possibilities? Why force a cube-shaped faith on a mountain-shaped world?

The focus on simplicity or unity, along with the strange, unsettling paeans to philosophy as a love with no beloved (or in which the beloved is totally unable to love you back), made me feel like this was all just backsliding into Platonism. Didn't we try this already?

Last time I'm not sure I noticed that both Spinoza and his Gentile Juliet, Clara, do the adolescent thing where they think they're in love with you because you deserve it so much. Everything about Spinoza's pedestal love of Clara is done so well--it's painfully endearing, it's totally wrongheaded, it's relatable, and it captures at least half of the problems with his philosophy. Plus Strain uses his voice really well, shifting perfectly from the ringing tones of the confident genius to a rougher, lower, more intimate register with Clara.

One benefit to the philosopher of having a definite, obligatory community is that he has to deal with everyone's questions, even the ones he doesn't like or see the point of. The Jewish community, because it includes so many people who are totally unlike Spinoza, can provoke and challenge him in a way that a community made up solely of his friends or equally-intelligent philosophers could not. (This, by the way, was one major failing of the "talk back" panel afterward, in which Leah Libresco very ably moderated two academic philosophy-types. We didn't get to talk back! It was insufficiently Jewish--specifically Jewish questions weren't raised at all, actually--and since the audience, full of feisty old Jews, didn't get to ask questions, the panelists were able to stick to their own preferred topics and approaches.)

Spinoza at one point comes very close to echoing this gnomic utterance of the squid!

I was weirdly reminded of this article about David Foster Wallace's use of popular self-help books and his fight against what in AA circles is called "terminal uniqueness" and which I think is called by Catholics spiritual pride. Spinoza by the end of this play has been through many shattering experiences: his father's death, his realization that he will die young of tuberculosis, and then the awful events of the play itself. But the thing is, none of the suffering or humiliation he undergoes happens because he's wrong, or in the wrong. That at least he's spared. And so in the end, when he thanks the congregation (aka us the audience) for what he's gained from what he's been put through, even this is not a gesture of full humility.

So. That's what the play made me think about. What about you?

BYZANTINE FRESCOES OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS: Via TKB.

Not everything is a social construct. Some things are made out of wood.
--apparently Nicola Karras, on Twitter?

HOW A THRILL BECOMES A LAW: Something I drafted and then rejected for the Cato Institute symposium on traditionalism. Beneath this post you'll find a review of an unnecessarily good horror movie, and some very small kitchen adventures.


I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.
--Julie Ruin, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”

The most important fact to know about the law is this: Law proceeds by analogy.

Common law allows us to see this procedure most blatantly. Bathsheba Jones hexed the cow of Modesty Smith, and since that's obviously wrong to do, we deduce that it's wrong for Britney Jones to adulterate the butter of Madison Smith. Common law can only exist because we can recognize similarities between cases.

But constitutional or statutory law relies on analogy—and therefore on aesthetics, the red-headed stepchild of rationalist political theory—far more than common law does. Common law at least compares stories to stories, like tracking variant versions of “Cinderella.” Statutory and especially constitutional law, which by their nature must appeal to abstract principles, can seem like an astringent application of pure reason to the mess of human community. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How do I know what is equal, what is cruel and unusual, what is a rational basis? These abstractions gain flesh only through stories. Since I'm desperately Plato-damaged, I'll put it like this: It's through love that we approach the Forms.

We've been trained to view aesthetic questions as volatile, whereas rational questions are stable. We've been trained to think that there is no wrong answer to aesthetic questions, whereas social science and peer review can translate moral questions into syllogisms—even into algebra, where our only task is to solve for “unjust.” And so arguing that our legal regime rests on aesthetic assumptions seems like arguing that our legal regime rests on a preference for chocolate over Rocky Road; and every side of every political argument works to pile up slush-mountains of statistics, in which self-selection or self-reporting or even self-comforting are all ignored because numbers are prettier than people.

Think of the word “happiness.” Story tells us how much it's worth (not too much, if you ask me) and whose perspective we should take in assessing it. A society which assesses new reproductive technologies and family forms will likely take very different perspectives if its basic image is of a child longing for knowledge of her father, as vs. an infertile woman longing for physical, biological connection to the child she yearns to raise. Both emotions are stunningly deep and heartfelt. But they point in opposite directions, and a society has to choose—because stories inevitably become analogies, and analogies become laws.

A friend of mine once suggested that we're so fond of TV shows about “doctors and policemen” because these professions serve the only goods we can all agree on: physical safety and health. And yet I think more recent shows about doctors and cops attract us precisely because they force one of our deepest philosophical conflicts into sharp focus: Do we serve health and safety, or is there some greater good, like liberty or creativity or authority? Shows from House to The Wire focus on the obvious consensus goods, in order to spotlight the more controversial goods.

Political philosophy—especially the libertarian variety, I'm sorry to say—tends to view emotional identification as an obviously illegitimate basis for law. It tends to view aesthetics as a creepy haunted mansion, devoid of the possibility of agreement between rational persons of good will. (That possibility is obviously manifest in every other realm of political philosophy, where all the big questions have been resolved!) I would instead argue that love lets us know what our abstractions mean, and therefore discourse and disagreement about love is the primary purpose of contemporary politics. There is no argument about rights, equality, or liberty, without at least a partial prior agreement about human nature.

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)

Valkenburgh: You spoke about philosophy with a simple girl? About what Plato thinks and what Aristotle thinks?

Spinoza: No, about what I think and what she thinks. Plato and Aristotle? You start listening to them and before you know it you're believing in rabbits out of hats, or the Virgin Birth!
--David Ives, The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch Spinoza

Lines from memory, almost certainly wrong in several places, and I admit they come across as a bit on-the-nose on the page like that. But a) obviously you know why I had to quote this, given my own trajectory! and b) the lines totally work onstage, in Theater J's fantastic, standing-ovation-worthy production. GO SEE THIS NOW. More soon.

"HEAVEN CAN WAIT": Me, at Inside Catholic, in which I discuss Hell, American character, slapping your mama, and the centurion who speared the side of Christ:

There's a terrific moment in the TV show House, in which the irascible and brilliant Dr. Greg House is explaining to a lapsed Catholic subordinate why he doesn't believe in the afterlife. House, with all the self-lacerating irony that actor Hugh Laurie can impart to the character, says, "I would hate to think that all of this was just a test."

House is right -- and he's offered a crucial diagnosis of one form of Catholic piety. There's a way of thinking about the afterlife that makes this life, here, irrelevant and even inexplicable. Catholics will sometimes argue against universalism -- the comforting belief that all people must be saved, because God would never be so cruel as to damn somebody's grandma -- by asking, "If everyone is saved, why even bother to do the right thing here on earth?"

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"'KISS'? WHAT IS 'KISS'?": So today, for the second time in a couple weeks, I came across that definition of postmodernism (Lyotard's?) where it's defined as the rejection of metanarratives. Here's why I think that's unhelpful. These thoughts are even more fragmentary than usual, which I suppose is appropriate....

I'm no more interested in a "definition" of postmodernism than I am in a definition of conservatism; both terms seem to imply more a tradition of discourse than an orthodoxy.

And within that tradition of discourse there are authors whose work relies heavily on certain highly-charged terms--words "surcharg'd with wine," as they say--and if you single out these words as especially important, that implies a metanarrative. This is still true even if the author doesn't attempt to discern or dictate much about the content of that metanarrative. The example I think of is Derrida's use of "the other" and "the avenir," both of which imply, I think, a sort of skeletal Jewish-or-maybe-Christian narrative. (And not, for example, a Platonist one, because of the emphasis on the avenir. Some narratives are excluded, which I'm pretty sure you can't do unless you do have a metanarrative, however parsimonious or covert.)

There are likely other elements of Derrida's thought which would conflict with the narrative implied by the other-avenir stuff; but it seems to me that you then end up either discerning conflict between narratives, or reconciling them somehow (either of which implies a metanarrative about what constitutes conflict and what constitutes reconciliation). Or, you know, just saying one thing and then saying something else, but at that point you're just giving up on the self, like when you put your nose right up to a pointillist painting and all the people turn out to be cacophonies of dots; that is certainly one way to do postmodernism, but not the only one within this tradition of discourse. And in fact, to my mind it's the least interesting response to conflicting implied narratives, because it's the only one where you don't ever have to change anything at all about yourself. You can just keep "holding Yes and No together in one hand," in Anne Carson's terrific phrase, which is the same thing as standing still. No choices are required and therefore no sacrifices and no personal transformation. What is the point of a life like that? I mean, I suppose you could be happy. If that's what you really want.

Back to Derrida and implied narratives, which in turn imply metanarratives. Now, I admit that I'm an extremist here: I think words like "vulture" and "sparrow" imply a metanarrative. But I don't think you have to go that far (although I wish you would! Didn't Wilde teach us that we must "go as far as possible"?) to accept the point that some words which were crucial to actual existing postmodernists do imply metanarratives.

In fact, I'd argue that the term "postmodernity" itself, while obviously insufficient and kind of hilariously woozy with indeterminacy, implies a fairly obvious narrative, in which modernity is a thing which it's important that we're post-. So by the time you're pretending to define it, you're already accepting and/or creating a metanarrative. (I'm guessing Lyotard, or whoever, knew this and addressed it somehow or decided not to care, so I'm really not addressing him but more his popularizers.)

And this brings me to John Paul II, whom I consider the greatest postmodernist of the past century, and whose wine-charged word was so often "nuptial" or "gift" or some similar insufficiently-hardcore way of saying "kiss." Not only in his writings on the "theology of the body" but also in his writings on faith and reason, and on philosophical practice, he tapped into and further explicated a narrative in which the primary metaphor for our lives is the kiss: both otherness and reconciliation, with neither term conquering the other. So much of his writing is pretty obviously a translation of basic Biblical rhetoric into the new language/slang/pidgin of postmodernity.

My bitter-little-lady thought for the day is to wonder whether existentialist postmodernism is simply Christianity reconceived as intellectual promiscuity: kissing everything in sight in an attempt at self-expression.

So... yeah, this was obviously much more of a blog post than a treatise! But then, I reject treatises utterly--if you must write philosophy, write dialogues. My main problem with JPII, on a philosophical level, is that he shoulda just kept writing plays.

RESOLVED: THE CONSERVATIVE CANNOT BE A PHILOSOPHER. So how many of the posts at Secular Right really boil down to rejections of philosophy as such?

Surely it is possible to be conservative, in love with Sophia, and--at least for a while!--atheist. I mean, lots of my friends are in that position, and I'm going to tentatively say that if something exists then that thing must be possible. So where are their allies?

FACEBOOK MEME: BOOKIE. 1) What author do you own the most books by? Probably Shakespeare--? I have a lot of Nietzsche (possibly all Nietzsche?), Angela Carter, and Agatha Christie. If we’re counting comics, definitely Los Bros. Hernandez.

2) What book do you own the most copies of? Two each of The Secret History and Story of O.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Nah, I’m easy.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with? The one who came to mind first is Grantaire--he loves the girls and he loves good wine, to the tune of “Vive Henri IV”!

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)? Hmm... candidates include The Last Unicorn, one of the Bruno and Boots books, or Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. If things I read first as a child are excluded, probably *waves tentacles in embarrassment* The Closing of the American Mind (at least three times) or The Secret History, again, some more.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? The Borribles Go for Broke.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year? Since March ’08: Eh, I feel bad naming Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement, because really I’m not sure that book could have been written in a way I would have found awesome. So I’ll say Generation Loss instead. 100 Selected Poems of E.E. CUMMINGS was also disappointing, since he’s able to do individual lines and even occasional whole poems that really hit me.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year? Since January ’09: The Imitation of Christ (re-read) or Perfumes: The Guide. Welcome to the madness that is me.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? Well, I’m not tagging anyone, though you should feel invited to play if you want to. You guys know which books I’m obsessed with.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature? Your mom. (I reject all Nobel things on principle.)

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie? The Genealogy of Morals.

...OK, I’ll play for real: Hirokazu Kore-eda directs The Plague; Derek Jarman (requiescat in pace) directs Against Nature--not convinced this would be a good movie, but it would definitely be memorable!; Alfred Hitchcock (ditto) directs Wuthering Heights.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie? In general I’m leery of books-turned-movies.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. Good grief, I can’t think of any! Too busy drinking from the keg of hatred every day, I guess.

14) What is the most low-brow book you've read as an adult? Harry Potter and the Deathly Adverbs.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Plato’s Parmenides, maybe. (And I tried to read Capital in fifth grade.)

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? I don’t think I’ve seen any obscure ones! Lame.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Russians.

18) Roth or Updike? Rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooth. (I mean, I haven’t read Updike, ever. But still: Roth!)

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Sorry, haven't read either.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Shakespeare because duh, then Milton, one of the great “poets of women’s hair” (Harold Bloom, I think?). If there were a question about comics adaptations rather than movie adaptations, I’d definitely push for a comics Paradise Lost; the snaky, time-shifting, connotation-heavy lines are perfect for sequential art.

21) Austen or Eliot? Austen, though to be honest, she doesn’t really do it for me. I’m like the only chick in the marriage movement who finds it hard to care about Jane Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I have never read anything at all by the following authors: Gogol, Proust, Goethe, de Tocqueville, Edith Stein. I’ve never read Portrait of a Lady, or anything even remotely longish by James; ditto Pushkin.

From Aristotle I've read exactly one chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (on akrasia), and I've never read Plato's Republic, nor have I read The City of God.

I neither speak nor read any language but English. That’s really the biggest gap.

23) What is your favorite novel? The Brothers Karamazov; but also, The Last Unicorn.

24) Play? Lear, but not onstage; for staging, honestly I think Beckett--either Endgame or Godot--because they’re great to read but gain so much from good staging. I’m not good at plays, though, unless they’re Shakespeare.

25) Poem? Eliot’s “Preludes.” I also really love Kathy Shaidle’s “Lobotomy Magnificat.”

26) Essay? I've read far too few essays (except by Orwell and Chesterton) to legitimately call this one; the Orwell essay I always return to is his review of Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography. For Chesterton, “The Architect of Spears.”

27) Short story? This one seems to shift around on me a lot. At the moment it might be something by Octavia Butler--probably the one where no one can communicate, the title of which I consistently forget (irony!). The most recent great short story I read was Eudora Welty, “Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden,” which made me forgive her for the overpraised “Why I Live at the P.O.” Rebecca Brown’s collection The Terrible Girls was a big influence.

28) Work of non-fiction? Does the Symposium count? Autobiography definitely doesn’t count, so Augustine’s Confessions are right out.

29) Who is your favorite writer? Shakespeare doesn't count, so Dostoevsky vs. Nietzsche.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today? No clue. I don’t read new stuff unless I’m getting paid, pretty much. (Or unless the author is Tim Powers.)

31) What is your desert island book? Arrrrggghhhh! Maybe complete Emily Dickinson?? No, that’s crazy. We’re assuming complete Shakespeare is cheating, as is the Bible. Karamazov again?? The Gay Science???? I hate this question!

32) And... what are you reading right now? Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Highly recommended despite her consistent attacks on symbolism/iconicity.

And the Gospel of John.

And, since I began this meme I've finished the Serano (still highly recommended) and started Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

THERE GOES MY WEEKEND! Audio recordings of Allan Bloom lecturing on Nietzsche, and (now with cool pix!) Plato.

Awesome, all-too-awesome.