IT'S FUN TO LOSE AND TO PRETEND: Kathleen Hanna on the secret history of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Rough language and imagery, and obviously I don't agree with her re: pregnancy centers, but if you can listen to this without crying then maybe you need to recalibrate. (And some guys in the audience hoot when she first mentions stripping, because... because agony and irony are side by side on my piano keys?)
Here we are now; entertain us.
Showing posts with label Kathleen Hanna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kathleen Hanna. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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.
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.
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