A Good Day for a Good-Bye

[Update, March 21: There's four inches of snow outside my window. What was I saying yesterday about the first day of spring?

Previously I had a long post up here, talking about why I've decided to say good-bye to blogging and blog-reading for the time being, about my job and family situation and why they need my undistracted attention right now. On reflection, I've decided to take that post down--it was pretty confessional, even by my own standards, and perhaps I was overreacting to certain recent events. Of course, maybe I wasn't: that remains to be seen. But either way, it's probably best to let things play themselves out, at least for a little while longer.

If you really want to read what I read, fear not; I'm sure it's cached somewhere on the internet. Plus I'm saving it, and maybe will put it back up again someday. In any case, to those who read it before, I mean what I said about how much I've learned from and valued the exchanges, insights, and laughs I've gotten from blogging. I hope I can come back to it someday. But if not, and if whatever path I end up on doesn't involve a return to this or any blog, I want you all to know that I've had a blast. Thanks.]

Illich, Day, Berry, Lasch and....Schor?

I've tried to keep up with the Crunchy Con discussion over the past week or two, but real life has been slowing me down somewhat. They moved through a discussion of consumerism last week, and this week the topic has been food; next up is homes and architecture. All of it is valuable, often insightful, sometimes frustrating (but in a good way) stuff. Last week, in particular, some of the themes they've been discussing came together for me: perhaps not coincidentally, at the same time that Juliet Schor visited our campus. But it has taken me more than a week to find the time to write them down.

Juliet Schor, for those who don't know, is an economist and sociologist who has made a name for herself through her studies of American work, leisure, and consumption habits. Many economists consider her data faulty and her conclusions overbroad, but that hasn't stopped many thousands of people from almost instinctively recognizing the essential truth of her interrelated theses: that contemporary Americans are to a great degree caught up in a game of constantly working and constantly consuming, tolerating ever-more invasive moves by corporate advertisers and bosses on our family time, our children's minds, and our sense of self, because earning and spending (and the economic growth which makes such material affluence possible) is one of the few ways in which we can actually pretend to feel real autonomy; the "choice" offered by markets is our addictive simulacrum of a limitless environment which could never have actually existed, but which we nonetheless pursue today at exhaustive, debilitating, economically unsustainable and for the most part hidden cost. Her work, to put it mildly, is challenging to way most of us work, play, and live. She herself, however, was anything but aggressive or challenging; when three of us went out to lunch with her, half of the conversation was funny anecdotes about her children (such as the time she let her children pick a film to rent at the video store, and they picked a film that was clearly marketed as a children's movie, but which was in fact an R-rated fantasia of sex and swearing). Most self-described conservatives today wouldn't cut her any slack, however, despite her obvious commitment to giving her family the same things they want to be able to give to their own: she's a leftist!, they'd shout. And they'd be right. She supports all sorts of progressive groups, movements and organizations, she said during lunch that she thought Senator Hillary Clinton's move to the right in regards to defense issues was simply incoherent--there's nothing about her that suggests "conservative."

Except, of course, the fact that she, unlike many others on the political right, is actually trying to "conserve" something substantive.

Rod Dreher made, in essence, this very point rather sharply last week: "The conservative protectionists fear loss of sovereignty and community, and subordinating those traditions to the global marketplace. The economic conservatives believe that the material progress available through expanding free trade is more important. Who is more conservative? It depends on what you want to conserve, doesn't it?" His conclusion was that, for the sort of conservatives he finds most appealing, conservatism cannot help but be "subversive"--involving a dedication to a moral order which demands iconoclastic resistance to many of the forces and habits of modernity. The research of Schor didn't bring Dreher to ask this question, but rather the writings of many thinkers whose warnings and laments nonetheless complement her "progressive" research quite well: Ivan Illich, Dorothy Day, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and numerous others, all of whom found great flaws in the homogenizing, materialist, privatizing mentality of modern society (and many of whom I've written often about before, for example here and here and here.) As Angelo Matera observed, backing up Dreher's point, these thinkers can be considered conservative only to the extent that their moral vision, at the present time, made them apparently unpopular on the secular left; there is nothing necessarily conservative about what they stand for, at least not in the conventional, current use of the term. I would agree with her, but go further: I would insist that, beyond contemporary party politics, there is a reason to call these folks conservative, and it is a reason that covers Schor just as well as Lasch. What it isn't is a reason that fits in with what folks like Jonah Goldberg would call the right.

This reason piggy-backs on what I wrote before, suggesting that a deeper reading of "crunchiness" can result in a recognition of its themes in the same quest for ethical "substantiveness" in the thinking of Hegel and then later Marx. Goldberg has picked up on this, though I don't think he understands the depth of the argument he's engaging. His actual review of Crunchy Cons is filled with suggestions to the effect that Dreher's crunchy conservatism is a species of Christian Marxism and Fabian socialism, that Dreher "often sounds like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Russell Kirk mask," and that such arguments are bound to ultimately lead their author to proclaim "To the Left, Here I Come." He suggests that what Dreher is flirting with is a "sacralization of politics," the antidote for which is apparently a kind of Augustinian libertarianism--the separation of the City of God and the City of Man made manifest through a defense of personal freedoms and property rights. He's very wrong about this, but wrong in a revealing and thought-provoking way. As Dreher suggested in his defense of his reliance in so many of these (let's call them) "subversive traditionalists," what most of the contemporary conservative movement wishes to conserve is the possibilities of material growth, seeing--as classical liberals have ever since John Locke--the essential rights of the individual as fundamentally tied up in the institution of property and the freedom of government-protected social and economic choice. That, according to those in this tradition, is the baseline which precedes all thinking about politics; any intrusion into this natural order, which is also a social order, is essentially indistinguishable from a Nietzschean will to power, a potentially fascist sacralization of an apparently spontaneous world. This is a point that Sheldon Wolin has made (in Politics and Vision), I think persuasively, in describing the way in which political consent was held out by Locke as a key to libertarian (or at least majoritarian) freedom, but in such a way as to make social and economic structures that govern civil life seemingly beneath the reach of politics (and thus presumably a cause of scandal if political arguments did attempt to reach out for them directly):

The upshot of Locke's argument was to obscure the political character of civil society. Its political qualities did not appear ab nihilo; they had been anticipated by the political form given the ideal state of nature. What can be said to be genuinely new political elements in civil society were introduced via the explicit agreement whereby men accepted a common body of rules and promised to obey the decisions of the majority. But more important was the minimal character of the political order. By this is meant not that the powers and jurisdictionn of government were closely restricted, for Locke's language allowed generous scope for government action, but rather that Locke initiated a way of thinking in which society, rather than the political order, was thepredominantt influence. Instead of asking the traditional question: what type of political order is required if society is to be maintained? Locke turned the question around to read: what social arrangements will insure the continuity of government? (pg. 276)

Anyone familiar with the history of political thought can identify the basic critique which lurks deep within Wolin's argument--it's Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origin of Inequality threw down a gauntlet that every defense of modernity ever since has had to pick up or ignore at their peril. What Rousseau saw in the modern world was not the seamless manifestation of a natural economic and social order, but a construct, a set of conventions which pass themselves off as spontaneous but which are, in fact, the product of history, a history in which introduction of property forced human beings into a settled existence, characterized by overextensionn, dependency, and inequality. Since, as Rousseau wrote, "ties of servitude are formed by men's mutual dependence and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to subjugate a man without first having placed him in the position of being unable to do without another" (part 1, para. 50). Thus so long as an economy of complete self-sufficiency--or, at the outside, of "rustic" and wholly voluntaristic village life--obtained, human beings were both free and equal, "but the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and the vasts forests changed into smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the harvests" (part 2, para. 19).

Rousseau was a complete misanthrope, of course, and neurotic to boot. Voltaire was being unfair, but not completely so, when he mocked Rousseau for seemingly calling for a retreat from modern life, modern technology, and the very idea of civilization. Conservatives since Burke have held him up as a villain, as a deeply disturbed individual who preached a kind of blindedness to actual human nature, hoping instead for individuals to alienate themselves entirely to a single collective within which individuals will be forced to recreate Rousseau's version of the natural world and thus be "free." There is a lot of truth to this caricature. But focus on his diagnosis, rather than his solutions (which, one should note, Rousseau himself never expressed much faith in). Rousseau pushes one to think about historically embedded social and economic forces, and think about them politically, rather than seeing "politics" as something which already individuated selves choose to do with a given social and economicinheritancee. This is not--or at least not necessarily--a "sacralization of politics," a step towards wht Goldberg too casually calls fascism; rather it is an attempt to refuse to grant all that which makes actual "conservation" difficult--namely, the trends in media and exchange and manners and expression which one contributor to the Crunchy Con blog called a "heavy smog"--any sort of "sacred" right to be recused from political consideration and collective action. (There is more to be said here, about which I'll perhaps write more later, regarding the fine but important difference between wanting politics to "transcend" the immanent, and wanting them to join in a "consecration" of such; in the meantime, read what Daniel Larison has to say.) Whatever their preferred forms of political organization and coordination--and Lasch, for one, despite his description as a crunchy conservative saint, voted for socialists and Democrats, including Bill Clinton, up until his death in 1994--all these "subversives" and critics of modernity are Rousseau's intellectual descendents, though certainly not only his (as Allan Carlson has observed, the need to take political action so as to conserve the necessary social and economic underpinnings of what later conservatives would idealize--in overwhelmingly apolitical, "values"-laden terminology--as the "natural family" was recognized by the Catholic church back when the Industrial Revolution was at its peak). If Goldberg is so quick to smell Rousseau in advocates of the crunchy ethos, then perhaps he--and they!--should ask if there isn't good reason to see such "progressive" ideas as perhaps central to any substantively conservative politics today. Consumption is made possible by and in turn shapes our socio-economic fabric; if the weave of such fabric (a "seamless garment," anyone?) is, according to the crunchy conservatives, the truly proper conservative concern--and I agree that it is--then those of a truly conservative temperament will want to address the causes and consequences of consumption, rather than leaving it off the political table entirely. Hence, Juliet Schor: an economist trying to identify those underlying trends--in advertising, in work expectations, in leisure habits, in buying and selling--which turn the social and economic structure against the kind of sustainability that, if they can look beyond their ideological blinders, both progressives and honest conservatives ought to recognize they have in common. In fact, if it is anyone who can't articulate an argument of sustainability, it is the faux-conservative, the individualist who has so bought into classical liberal ideas (or the stunted, 19th-century reduction of such) as to be unable to conceive of the individual as anything other than a property-owning and resource-consuming unit already separated from any organic or historical structure or order....which therefore makes it next to impossible for them to understand that there is any substantive prior thing there that warrants sustaining in the first place.

This isn't to say that the sort of recommendations made by any given thinker who clearly understands the need to affirm, in the face of classical liberal and contemporary "conservative" defenses of the market, the populist possibility of turning politics towards those deep social and economic forces which make the conservation of a good society either possible of impossible, would always be identical to Schor's recommendations. Not all "Rousseauian conservatives" (left traditionalists? family-oriented progressives?) are alike, that's for certain. I strongly suspect that Dreher, and most of those he interviewed for his book, would pretty quickly concur with a great deal of Schor's progressive politics--her opposition to the penetration of corporate advertising into children's media and the public schools, the sexualization and commodifying of what used to be pretty innocent areas of human and family work and play, the dehumanizing demands which modern meritocratic expectations place on families, and the concomitant destruction to the social fabric which the move-away-and-follow-the-money mentality engendered by our meritocracy visits upon neighborhoods. But that is not to say they'd agree with her specific policy recommendations, if only because the balancing of such costs versus the obvious goods of liberty can be assessed in so many different ways.

In terms of political theory, Schor herself may well come to the conclusions she does not because she shares an appreciation for a moral order or tradition that needs an affirmative economic and social defense, but rather because she holds onto a vision of individual autonomy which incorporates social and economic dimensions. This came up in a discussion about parenting that Harry Brighouse, Tim Burke, Laura McKenna and I had a long time back (read the whole thread). For myself, while I consider such a culturally aware and robust notion of equality and autonomy a huge advance over the classical liberal one, I prefer to embrace the "deeper" Rousseauian connection between such diverse thinkers as Illich and Day and Berry and Lasch and Schor, and see in their crunchy conservatism, to whatever degree they would identify with such, a communitarian sensibility, one that wishes to articulate a collective concern for the moral order of our lives, and hence also the social and economic environment within which we shop, eat, dress, work, worship and play. (These two posts move the discussion in the right--as opposed to the "Right"--direction, I think.) Of course, everyone will emphasize a different aspect of that sensibility, and sometimes that'll introduce contradictions, of which there are surely many on the left. But I'm much more sympathetic to those "conservatives" who understand the need to get at the contradictions which modernity presents, than to those who see the source of those contradictions as intolerable, and deny their place in conservatism entirely.

Still Chewing...

I find myself checking into NRO's Crunchy Con blog every half-hour or so; there's so much good thought there, put forward by a lot of smart people. But then there's Jonah Goldberg....

You have to give him credit for knowing where he stands: his doesn't care for crunchy conservatism or anything like unto to it. Why? For both stylistic and substantive reasons, I think, as I wrote over at Laura's place here. Goldberg's hang-up with what Rod Dreher is trying to do through his book, in my view, comes down to his apparently firm belief that "conservatism" means primarily growing up and taking responsibility for yourself, whatever that "self" may be. In other words, it's very individualistic and libertarian, though not necessarily in a principled sense; what is actually "conserved" in his conservatism isn't very clear. It's also very "establishment": you put on your tie and walk out the door and make your own way in the world and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I suspect that Goldberg sees in "crunchiness"--sticking close to family, tending your garden, getting together at the neighborhood organic food co-op, supporting your local church--everything he hates about (his uninformed stereotype of) liberalism: it's weak, it makes you dependent on others, it's cloying, it lowers your horizon, it's for wusses. The possibility that conserving family and community and authenticity--holding onto a "common good," in other words--might actually sometimes require just such consensual and egalitarian arrangements, actually obliging the development of the self in some collective direction, is something he cannot tolerate. Real men won't stand for being told what to do, even in the public interest.

Some of the other contributors held Goldberg's feet to the fire regarding the whole issue of speaking in terms of the common good, or whether it really is even possible to talk about politics in the philosophically libertarian language of a field of neutral choices. Goldberg responded:

It is one thing to say that government polices are never neutral in their outcomes and quite another to say that because this is so we should give up the ideal of government neutrality. Much of what conservatism has fought against in the last fifty years has been the notion that elected and unelected government officials (and even democratic majorities) should be allowed to decide what's good for everybody. Obviously the federal government needs to mind the general welfare and one can get into trouble when one gets absolutist on either side of this either/or framing. But as a general proposition I want my federal government as libertarian as possible and my local community as communitarian as feasible. What scares me (or one of the things that scares me) is that so much of this Crunchy stuff buys into the view that the "personal is political." I don't want the federal government to be able to pick winners and losers based on that worldview.

Let's think about this for a moment. There's an interesting point to be made here, though Goldberg does come close to fully articulating it. Ignore the huge red herring in this passage--that is, Goldberg's complete dismissal of the possibility that an articulation of a "common good"--on any level--might actually involve some democratic participation and representation, thus resulting in something more than just an arbitrary "picking." (Though that's a pretty revealing glimpse into his basic estimation of human ordering in the first place.) Let's just address his libertarian-communitarian distinction.

Is communitarianism--in this case, meaning a concern for consensus, identity, authority, and the pursuit of a common good--good or bad? If it's good, then why wouldn't you want libertarianism on the federal level; shouldn't you try to bring forth whatever kind of communitarian feeling is possible on any level of government? The quick response is that the federal government isn't the same as a neighborhood association--but who is arguing that it is? That's a straw man; of course a national body can't be communitarian or republican or concerned with a common good in exactly the same way a small locality can--that's an understanding and an argument which goes all the way back to the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and earlier. But given that reality, why does it follow that such language should be wholly abandoned once one leaves the local level, save only for matters of "general welfare"? (Was fighting a war to end slave power in the South a matter of the "general welfare"?)

On the other hand, maybe because Goldberg actually thinks communitarianism is bad? That it infringes upon his bedrock individualism? If so, why would he want localities to be communitarian at all? Sure, national governments can oppress people terribly, but it's not like local communities can't be pretty oppressive as well. (Female circumcision is defended in local, tribal African communities, not by the states within which such communities reside.) Maybe Goldberg thinks communitarianism and inculcating notions of a common good is a necessary evil, one that we need it to form the sort of civic virtues and social capital which make an otherwise libertarian society sustainable? In that case, we would want communitarian communities, but only so as to provide citizens the opportunity to escape from such when they grow up, so they can enjoy "real" freedom. But that, of course, raises the question of how to keep said local communities going from generation to generation, if the real pay-off of American society is to be able to escape into a wider, more libertarian polity. And moreover, if that's the way Goldberg thinks, then shouldn't he have reluctantly written that local communities should only be as communitarian "as necessary," rather than saying they should be as communitarian "as feasible"?

The only way to make this coherent is to argue that the very meaning of "community" and "the common good" fundamentally alters when it is expanded beyond a particular level, such that the harms associated with it start dramatically outweighing the benefits. That's a valid argument to make. But it needs to be made, rather than simply asserted as Goldberg does here as if it's some sort of obvious, prudent truism. Caleb Stegall, a much more thoughtful writer, goes some distance towards articulating this. He cites a thoughtful e-mail which argues that "in promoting the genuine goods of tradition, community, public beauty, local variety and family integrity on which most conservatives agree, it's important to disentangle three modes of promoting the perceived Good: 1) personal suasion, religious teaching, conversion, appeals to beauty and justice; 2) social pressure, the threat of ostracism, moralistic disapproval; 3) governmental diktat," and which comes to the conclusion that, as most Americans "have little patience with the intrusive force of the Gemeinshaft," we end being "comfortable....with mode 1) and, oddly enough, mode 3), [but] deeply resistant to mode 2)"; following this, Stegall suggests that, since he believes community and the common good really does dramatically change as we move into nonlocal contexts, crunchy conservatives who want to avoid looking like statists and incipient fascists need to work on number 2):

The kind of "libertarian/communitarianism" I would advocate for is premised almost entirely on his mode #2 with a dash of #1 thrown in. What it requires is a renewed appreciation for society; for what Wendell Berry calls "membership"--a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. It's what the old English jurist Fletcher Moulton called "obedience to the unenforceable." It is tradition in this sense, in the societal sense, that is required for order. Social context and membership within it is not something which can be simply valued or appropriated. Tradition must be inheritable, or always-already inherited, to be wholly itself. It is a gift of givenness, given to the point of being so formative of the order of man's soul that it is ineradicable even from those who turn against it. So, yes, the individual remains free to choose, but in the choosing he is always choosing against an important part of himself.

Where all this is pointing towards is the anarchism/communitarianism/localist continuum, which Stegall praises and which Lee over at Verbum Ipsum highlights. So does that mean we're all in agreement in disagreeing with Goldberg, at least insofar as the proper locus of the articulation of a common good goes, so long as I shelve any hope for a national common good?

Not entirely, and it may be that our differences on this point is really what explains where "left traditionalists" like myself part ways with other crunchies. What all of this turns on, I think, is the basis upon which one can attribute legitimate consensual and/or normative force to something "social"--that is, something that isn't restricted to cramped desires of the sovereign individual, and yet isn't on the other hand just a blank check written to a faceless, corporate state. From what Stegall writes, with his sympathy for "anarchic" or "libertarian" communitarianism--the sort exercised by the Amish and other radically dissenting groups, for example--it appears that his judgment is that, once one moves beyond the immediately local, all affectivity (bonds of attachment, the sort of thing that make "social" persuasion and collective authority and discipline possible) is lost, and anything that attempts to maintain such is really just acting like a state....and since states by definition always centralize power at the expense of persons, that means we need to keep our larger polities and political aspirations as "stateless"--and thus as "anarchic" or "libertarian" in a particular sense--as possible. But I'm somewhat more sympathetic to modernity's particular take on "liberal society." I think one can be liberal--in a political if not philosophical sense--and still link up with something substantive and connective and affective. Charles Taylor's "alternative modernity" is my vision here; the ability to see that while a modern concept like "nationality" obviously can't do everything a local community can, it can nonetheless do some things, instantiate some common goods that one can feel affectionate towards and thus feel bonded to. Nations, in other words, in my mind need not be merely imagined props that states use to justify their power, but actual socialities through which certain communitarian goods can be articulated.

But in any case, whether or not the language of community can provide only local alternatives or broader, collective ones to modern consumerist liberalism, we're in agreement that common goods exist, that traditions exist, that there is such a thing as "soulcraft" and that to at least some extent the personal is political....and so that living in such a way as to promote the ability of persons to collectively order themselves (I would hope in egalitarian ways) along with others is a much better way of life than thinking of oneself as an independent self who never needs to be told what to do. In other words, I think we're in agreement that Goldberg is completely missing the boat.

Something to Chew On

I haven't read Rod Dreher's new book on "crunchy conservatives," but I'm familiar with the article which originally inspired it, and the great discussions which Dreher's thesis has prompted on the new blog which National Review has launched for it, as well as on some of my favorite blogs, including Verbum Ipsum and Caelum et Terra. Both of those posts express sympathy, or at least interest, in the crunchy con idea--nicely summed up by Dreher's long subtitle to his book: "How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)"--but both express some doubt as to the usefulness of the term itself. (Daniel Larison and Amy Welborn are somewhat dubious too.) For my part, I see something of real substance and importance in Dreher's word choice, though it certainly isn't anything close to what he actually had in mind.

For Dreher, it all begins with granola. Over the past decade or two, his personal political and religious journey has led him to embrace, wherever he could find it, the local, the authentic, the organic, the rural and ethnic. In other words, he became a traditionalist--but he did it by way of a realization that big corporations and suburban sprawl and all the tropes of growth-maximizing capitalism did a terrible job at conserving culinary or artistic or religion or family traditions. And so, as he did seek out these things--by, among other things, buying vegetables at a local organic co-op--he found himself associating more and more with the sort of people that he'd always previously identified as "hippies," the sort of countercultural radicals that the Republican party has politically benefited so much from demonizing (by no means always inaccurately) for the better part of 40 years. Gradually, he realized that he had a lot of sympathy for that counterculture, and that, amongst his home-schooling and subsistence-farming friends, such sympathy was actually pretty deep. So when he takes on contemporary conservatism--with a manifesto that includes such statements as "modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff"; "big business deserves as much skepticism as big government"; "beauty is more important than efficiency"; and my favorite, "Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract"--he does it by way of invoking this kind of "hip" traditionalism, the resistance to American consumerism which was at least as much a product of the communes and the "drop out" mentality of the 60s and 70s as any kind of informed, serious devotion to older religious and social traditions. Hence, "crunchy" cons--conservatives that eat granola, who aren't that into the smooth, streamlined, stainless steel suburban world that actually consists of most of the Republican party's current base.

Some of those who are otherwise wholly in favor of Dreher's vision--even if they doubt the likelihood of being able to reform the Republican party from within--take issue with his crunchy language because they think the very idea of being "countercultural" can't ever be more than a hip affectation; what is needed is the recovery of real culture, not the pose of standing aside from it. Caleb Stegall, of The New Pantagruel, makes this point brilliantly: authenticity and virtue, he writes, are better conserved through the "quiet romanticism still to be had [by] living a life closely rooted to the ground" rather than through the overt (and thus actually rather individualistic) rejectionism practiced by the hippies. I think he's right, at least insofar as Dreher's original inspiration goes. But I'll still defend "crunchiness," because what I see in that term is an opening to make a philosophical point, one which can tell us something about what it means to make culture substantive, authoritative, chewy you might say, in our otherwise mostly quicksilver, superficial, transactional world.

I've written a lot before about the need for some sense of authority, for a spiritual seriousness, to undergird progressive politics. This is something which Wilfred McClay recently commented on, in connection with early Progressivism and the New Deal coalition and how dependent both of those liberal moments were on church-goers, on evangelicals and Catholics, on the moral and intellectual resources and arguments that naturally went along with a certain localized and "parochial" feeling of egalitarian and religious belonging (and, thus, also obligation). This is how I put it in a very long post a year and a half ago:

It is affection, specifically that which arises from and depends upon a shared life, a defined (and therefore somewhat limited) life, that makes possible real social concern, a concern which is not restricted to a needs-tested distribution of a few select goods (which at best can only result in the just treatment of those who accept the terms of choice which the market--and those who are lucky/hard-working/well-connected enough to dominate it--consciously or unconsciously impose), but which actually seeks make the production of goods a component of one's participation in the community. Not for nothing did late 19th-century populism easily merge with socialism, and not for nothing are social democrats today often the most responsive to the diverse demands of local communities, whether in neighborhood design, public schooling, welfare provision, or a dozen other areas. To talk about populist justice means to talk about "the people" not in the abstract, whether behind a veil of ignorance (John Rawls) or as individual choosers confident in their holdings (Robert Nozick), but to begin where they live, in their (often religious) communities.

The granola "crunchiness" of most of those who either actually lived in or at least admired various countercultural and communal socio-economic living arrangements had very little to do with any of this; they were not, for the most part, thinking hard about how to realize something meaningful through populist or local action. But nonetheless, such activities can give us access to ways of life which can be productively understood in light of Hegel's notion of Sittlichkeit, or "ethical life." What makes for a meaningful life, Hegel argued contra the liberal universalism of Kant (a universalism that is clearly echoed in both the individualistic liberalism of both Rawls and Nozick), was the realization of the movements of history and "Spirit" in actual lived localities, practices, and institutions. Hegel was an idealist, and found the empiricism that lays behind most modern construals of human liberty to be politically shallow and ontologically flawed. However, following the path laid down by romantics like J.G. Herder, Hegel insisted that our apprehension of and progression through ideas couldn't happen in any other way except through an attendance to the forms and rituals and organizations and groups that make up everyday life. One doesn't have to embrace every iota of Hegel's ambitious (some would say totalizing) logical systematizing of philosophy--I certainly don't!--to appreciate that it is this insight which makes the original Marxist argument so powerful. Marx was able to present something more than ideas whose normative force might arise entirely from our independent agreement with them; he gave us an argument for egalitarian arrangements that obliged us to see our economies, our families, our communities as implicating us in the very terms of the struggle. That doesn't mean, I think, that outcomes are fated--the socialism of Marx's Communist Manifesto was, I think, was far less materially deterministic than his later writings would indicate--but it does mean that the struggle over of what kind of ethic, what kind of "spirit," will guide our lives, demands more than some ex post liberal calculations about how to distribute and balance all our wants. Such calculations--as Rawls makes clear with his clean, uncomplicated description of the difference principle--can be reduced to easily whipped up and swallowed formula; Hegel and Marx, by contrast, make such moral concerns substantive: make them, again, tough and well-rooted and chewy.

Non-liberal leftists--or rather, leftists for whom being liberal involves a personal attitude, not moral accounting--can't avoid reflecting on the fact that Marx knew well the ethical force of that which emergent industrial capitalism was destroying; in the Communist Manifesto, he was able to describe the uprooting of communities and the impoverishment of families in a language that sounds like no one else so much as Burke. I don't mean to get too abstractly philosophical (too late, you say!); admittedly, the parallels I'm drawing here are anything but perfect. But still, there is a sense in which certain progressives--like myself--have always been aware of the need to ground our socialist goals in a spiritual, moral, substantive, actually lived world, whereas so many others--liberals like Rawls--think the whole point is to defend the self's ability to pick themselves up and live wherever and however they like. And, of course, to the extent that most American conservatives today are liberals too, believing more in economic liberty (and the "creative destruction" and mobility and meritocracy which comes along with such) than in commonality, they offer relatively little resistance to what I think are liberalism's worst consequences: a devaluing of what Dreher rightly called the Small, Local, Old, and Particular. And so, in my own admittedly idiosyncratic way, I like any kind of argument for crunchiness, whatever its origin and intention: in my view, such helps remind us that what is at stake here isn't just granola, but also the whole question of what, in the long run, modernity will leave undigested, allowing us, the people, to locally and collectively chew it over.

Insofar as my own preferences go, I obviously realize that serious Christian socialists are practically non-existent in today's world, and perhaps there's a reason for this; perhaps there is a deep tension between the two worldviews that obliges one to inevitably be sacrificed to the other. But I still have hope. Indeed, I think we have to hope for such: without the contribution which such progressive and egalitarian concerns can make to traditionalism, the whole crunchy conservative movement will fall, I suspect, before the obvious response: namely, how do you afford in today's world to live a more or less enclosed and localized life? It's not for no reason that many ordinary conservatives end up defending Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and dismissing Whole Foods: the latter is more expensive, and often drenched in a liberal and urban elitism which will have the likely result of leading any conservatism (even a crunchy one!) that cannot or will not talk about class to simply dismiss the concern for authenticity entirely. (Ross Douthat understands this, though not quite enough, I think.) Such may well be the fate of Dreher's argument. But in the meantime, I'm envious: thanks to Dreher's book, what we have here are conservatives having a serious conversation about getting crunchy, throwing some fruits and nuts and culture into the mix. I can only wait--perhaps in vain--for the day when progressives get around to noticing that it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to do the same.

(For a Mormon angle on all this, see here. And for a follow-up to this post, see here.)

Liberals, Theocons and Cartoons

(I meant to have this up earlier, but Blogger has been down for a while.)

Some friends of mine and I have been talking about Danish cartoon controversy all week. The facts aren't much in dispute--the cartoons appeared last September; there were local protests from Muslims and grievances expressed in various Danish venues; as such complaints were rebuffed (whether legitimately or not) those angered by the cartoons organized, radicalized, spread the word. By February, Islamic governments were formally issuing protests, mobs were burning embassies and being shot at by police in fear for their lives and property, and European newspapers were defiantly--and self-congratulatingly--reprinting the cartoons (and adding some that were even more offensive) in shows of solidarity. And here we are, wondering what will come next.

One meme that has made its way around the blogosphere I think summed up the common-sense position pretty well: "Freedom of Speech: Good. Bigotry/Deliberate Disrespect: Bad. Wanton Rioting/Violence: Bad. The first doesn't excuse the second, and the second doesn't excuse the third." Pragmatically, that makes good sense. However, it isn't necessarily clear how you theoretically get to such a point; it gets you called out for being a lousy "moderate". You could, of course, be a determined rights-focused liberal, holding the cartoonists' rights to offend as central to human freedom. But if you do that, you lose the second step; you lose the ability to talk about civility, to make the point which Peter Levine does--namely that the decision to run the cartoons was a bad if legally defensible one, and that the decision of other newspapers throughout Europe to reprint them is even worse. That's not to say one should ignore the ugliness of much of what the protesters are demanding; only that to reduce this to a contest between rampaging, violent theocrats and beleaguered servants of free discourse risks partaking of what Ken Macleod called the "liberalism of fools" (discussed here at Crooked Timber): namely, the tendency shared by many libertarian-type liberals to see in the refusal of any community to be "profaned"--that is, to be reduced to one more disposable product in the elite-run marketplace of ideas--an absolute challenge to any kind of democratic freedom whatsoever. Such a perspective is blind to all the ways in which such particularized communities might feel the supposedly open public square around them to in fact be structured and restrictive (nicely recounted by Scott Martens here); it cannot see (here comes one of my favorite words in these never-ending liberal-communitarian discussions), the context. But how to acknowledge that context, to act civilly and with sympathy to particularized concerns in the midst of the culturally and religiously and socio-economically divided environments one finds around the world--and especially in many Western European nations--today? Strict Enlightenment liberals would suggest you can't--if communal or religious concerns cannot be privatized then they aren't concerns anymore, they're demands, and such comprehensive demands have no place in civil society. I don't think that's the proper way to account for things. But what's the alternative?

Well, one might consider Peter Beinart's, as he lays it out here (subscribers-only link, unfortunately):

Of course, the Danish newspaper had the right to publish [the cartoons]. But, in doing so, it revealed a particularly European prejudice, one that the United States must take care not to repeat. The prejudice is not simply against Islam. Rather, it stems from Europe's--or at least Western Europe's--inability to take religion seriously at all....In France, educational integration means public schools can expel Muslim girls for wearing headscarves. In Denmark, economic integration means employers can fire Muslim women for doing the same. Neither is conceivable in the United States, where the right to be openly religious is considered precious....[A] key U.S. advantage in the war on terrorism is America's capacity to be both religious and ecumenical. And few public figures encapsulate that better than George W. Bush, a man who has helped turn the Republican Party into a multi-denominational coalition of the devout. The intriguing question going forward is whether Bush's brand of conservative ecumenism--at least as it regards Muslims--will endure....

[D]espite Bush's universalism, clash-of-civilizations thinking is deeply ingrained on the American right. In the first decades of the cold war, conservatives frequently described the fight against communism as a struggle not merely for freedom, but for Western civilization. That's why so many conservatives opposed the rapid decolonization of the Third World. They saw it not as a triumph for democracy--which they considered unlikely to take root in non-Western soil--but as evidence of civilizational retreat....It was only several years into the 1980s--as pro-American democracies took shape in East Asia and Latin America--that Reagan and large numbers of conservatives embraced the culturally (and religiously) universalist rhetoric that Bush has made his own. Now, in the wake of the cartoon saga, the election of Hamas and the ongoing trauma in Iraq, that universalism is being challenged, and the older, more pessimistic conservatism is resurfacing. And that's a very bad thing. No matter what you think of the religious right's domestic agenda, the United States is much better off with a religious right than with a Christian right or a Judeo-Christian right. When conservative American Christians lose their ability to identify with conservative Muslims--to imagine their faith as in some basic way the same and deserving of the same basic respect--the United States will find itself less able to speak to the Muslim world, and less able to listen to it. It will find itself, in other words, in the place Europe is now. And that's a place no American should want to be.

A good friend of mine, one intimately familiar with First Things and the theocon crowd, was highly disturbed by Beinart's take; he saw it as a move away from a robust and neutral liberalism, and towards something disturbingly comprehensive and particular, an attempt to use aspects of Americanreligiosityy to incorporate certain proper liberal virtues into a "sentimental civic-religious-providential amalgam of America, Christianity, and Democracy." Danish cartoonists and free speech can be defended, and should be defended, without the involvement of any of that. My take, predictably, was somewhat different.

The way I see it, Beinart is trying here is marrying the religious right's hostility to secularism to TNR's vaguely Wilsonian/Gladstonian brand of moralistic liberal universalism. Religion, as he presents it, is a way of managing difference; by embracing people of all faiths as equal partners in the struggle to make the public square meaningful and respectful, one can bring various kinds of religious particularism together with a "culturally (and religiously) universalist rhetoric." Everyone can be democratic, and everyone should democratize, because in an ecumenical--as opposed to secular--democracy, no one of faith has any reason to fear. It's an intriguing argument. I think that if you're talking about a "deep" ecumenicalism--say in a Hegelian or Herderian sense--in which one honestly believes that all (or at least most) religions are invariably working or pointing towards some sort of common end, then presumably the various fruits which disparate religions develop along the way will be able to be supported without undermining the zeal which sustains the religious enterprise itself. If, on the other hand, ecumenicalism results not from actual religious universalism, but because one just happens to think that all religions ought to conform to various obvious liberal pieties, then I think in the long run Beinart will find that the ecumenicalism he's praising and hoping to attach his democratization project to won't have much staying power. Religion is about binding, about particularity; if in America particularity has been uniquely compatible with universalism, I doubt that has much to do with bone-deep liberal pluralism and a lot more to do with the democratizing and empowering legacy of Protestant Christianity in America itself. (Think of William Jennings Bryan, again.) This suggests that the two "Rights" Beinart describes--the "religious" one, and the Christian one--have a rather ambiguous relationship, at least in the U.S.: a complete embrace the latter would simply be incompatible with the sort of decentralized, pluralistic society which the basic structures and guarantees of our politics makes possible, and yet the former will have little force and energy without at least some people continuing to embrace the latter nonetheless. If you want to be able to protect civil liberties and civil society at the same time, then you need to see that society as more than just the sum of the freedom it provides; you need to accept some sort of model of the world which privileges certain goods and certain ends, and teaches you to be responsible and to act in a civil manner as you pursue them.

Now, how well any of this speculation about America's particular Christian legacy of ecumenical democracy and empowerment actually translates into the democratic universalism of liberal hawks like Beinart is, to say the least, a contested question. (Bryan himself broke with President Wilson over this very issue.) But in regards to the particular matter of the cartoon issue, I think Beinart is onto something. Clearly, one of the reasons that Bush and many other Americans--including many on the left--have not gone out of their way to defend the rights of the cartoonists is because they are disturbed by the targeting of people of faith simply to prove a point....which suggests that we do, in fact, still have at least some ghostly attachment in this country to a comprehensive vision of the relationship between religion and civil society, as opposed to a rigorously neutral conception that respects the rights of individuals above all else. We're not alone in possessing such a remnant of communal concern--and in fact, considering what a very, very bad job we do at actually putting money behind our notions of the common good, one suspects that the frequent failures of secular European notions of civility aren't compensated for by social strengths that our more ecumenical collective notions lack. Still, as far as the matters Beinart raises go, I think he describes a potentially important American advantage: most Americans take religion seriously, and it yet take it seriously in a universalist, "liberal" way.

The danger to maintaining this position is at least two-fold. There is the tendency to believe that liberal commitments alone are by definition both secular and weak: that Europe, lacking in religious faith as it does, will become "Eurabia" and fall under the sword of jihadists because, after all, only one religion can take out another. This is, in my view, the true theocon position (see Richard Neuhaus here), and argument that, whether or not they realize it, I think actually banishes any interest in civil society and assumes that we're in a civilizational wresting match, pure and simple. But then there is also the tendency to believe that there need be no tension between particularity and liberal society whatsoever: that all religions have to do is properly privatize their expressions and conform to liberal forms, and all will be well. This, I think, fetishizes the wrong aspect of liberalism: it leads one to believe that condemning the Danish cartoonists from any given particularist religious perspective is somehow imposing a vicious theocratic particularity upon the whole. But if you're keeping your eye on an ever-contested-yet-enduring commitment to an ecumenical (that is, both religious and liberal) public good, as opposed to simply everyone's rights to disregard such according to their own interests--in other words, if you insist that on some level the proper response to multicultural controversies like these must incorporate elements of liberalism and a certain kind of "conreligiosityeligiousity--then that conclusion doesn't follow.

My friend tells me that it doesn't work that way, that a strong insistence upon liberal goods is our best and only reliable truly defense against fascism in all its varieties. He may be right; I may be terminally naive. But if the opposite of naivete means not blinking when confronted with some of the anti-Muslim cartoons that have circulated in Europe lately....well, I'd rather focus my gaze on some other set collective hopes, for at least as long as I am able.

William Jennings Bryan and Being a Liberal Christian

Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University, has written a new biography of William Jennings Bryan, the great Christian reformer, orator, and populist leader of a century ago. I haven't read the book, which has only just been released, but I have read some short pieces by Kazin in which he talks about what Bryan's career and ideas can teach us about Christianity and progressive politics in America, both historically and today. In particular, there is this essay from Dissent, and this one from The American Prospect, the latter of which led to an interesting debate between Kazin and Kevin Mattson. All are worth reading.

A number of Kazin's claims in these pieces are particularly noteworthy. First, he argues that the apparent disunion today between "traditional" or "orthodox" Christian faith and liberal reforms only goes back a generation or two; in fact, the way Bryan used obvious scriptural imagery and argument to attack corporate greed and militarism and defend labor unions and public campaign financing was not only not unique, but in fact was common to the thinking and rhetoric of practically every populist or progressive politician well into the first-half of the 20th century. (And among black politicians and civil rights leaders, much longer than that.) Second, Kazin is convinced that, as much as he--a self-described "secular leftist"--is made somewhat uncomfortable by it, those on the left in America today will never enjoy influence again unless they can learn to "speak in unabashedly moral terms....[and] base their moral claims on one or another religious tradition." He has little patience for the "dishonest pandering of the last two Democratic nominees for president, who mouthed banalities about 'respecting people of faith' and asking 'What would Jesus do?' before switching into their standard stump speeches"--no, he insists, the marriage of religiosity and progressive politics (a marriage that was practically rock solid in white, Protestant American life before the intellectual and social transformations of the 1950s and 60s) has to go deeper than that:

For too long, progressives have hoped and demanded that governments solve the problems that beset our society--and complained when conservatives starve or eliminate programs that benefit millions. But in American history, popular movements, imbued with a revivalistic ethos, have been the surest way to pressure the state to do the right thing, consistently if not always effectively....Today, we need a moral equivalent of conservative religiosity, one that can inspire both believers and non-believers on the left to do the kind of smart, determined, often self-sacrificing work that the right receives from its adherents, in and out of presidential election years. As in 1906, such an alternative will draw, in part, on the language of the Bible and the supernatural beliefs of most Americans....The marriage between politics and piety in America has always been full of conflicts and misunderstandings. But it remains as strong as in Bryan's day and will probably endure as long as the nation itself. To deplore that fact only avoids the task of engaging it.

It should surprise no reader of this blog that I'm completely on board with this program. In particular, it's great to see someone like Kazin wrestle with the fact that one cannot separate the Bryan who attacked laissez-faire economics and defended populist farming policies in 1896, from the Bryan who supported Tennessee's effort to prosecute John Scopes in 1925 for teaching "any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible"--in other words, for teaching evolution. If you were serious about the first, in Bryan's mind, then of course you had to be serious about the second: the cruelties of Social Darwinism and the reductiveness of evolutionary biology were both contradicted by scripture. As Kazin put it, speaking of Bryan and his supporters, "they could not conceive of a moral language that neglected the Bible or viewed it as no more than a captivating historical text." In other words, they were Bible-based Christians first, and liberals and populists and progressives second--or better, they were the latter because they were the former. The latter described how they interpreted and implemented their commitment to the Bible, and that label was important (because there were just as many Christians then as now who insisted the message of Christianity was otherwise--Pat Robertson today probably has a lot in common with the shamelessly wealth-praising preacher Russell "Acres of Diamonds" Conwell of Bryan's day)....but it was not their primary label. On the contrary, their social mores and political convictions were constrained and defined by the authority of the Biblical tradition. And if 20th-century American liberalism--as it continued down a path set by cynics and secularists like Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken--gradually became something which (again in Kazin's words), "harbor[ed] a nagging contempt for the God-fearing, the unhip, and the poorly educated"....well then, evangelical Christians of the heartland and liberal politics would have to part ways. Which, tragically, is exactly what has happened. (That's not the whole story, of course: it ignores the important role of race, and the failure--a tragic and terribly divisive one for liberal reform movements--of white evangelicals, including Bryan, to ever seriously address racism in America. But to ignore the "traditionalist" aspect of the story is just as limiting, something which Kazin's study of Bryan makes clear.)

This notion of authority, and the importance for anyone on the left who embraces or at least wants to makes use of the power of Christianity to acknowledge it, is something I've discussed before. This is one of the reasons I admire Hugo Schwyzer's writings so much; as he makes clear in a recent blog post, he is both saddened and frustrated by those Christians on the left who get so intimidated or angry at the "Christian Right" that they cannot be up front about (indeed sometimes deny or hide) their own commitment to the Christian faith. Hugo points the finger in the exactly right direction: at certain types of liberal Christians who--for numerous reasons well described by Kazin--have found themselves over the course of the past 50 years associating and agreeing more and more often with secularists (often well-heeled, well-educated ones), and who, because they don't want to offend their allies (and also often just because they want to distinguish themselves from those "Bible-thumpers" on the other side of the political aisle), have purposefully emptied their arguments of any serious appeal to religious tradition. He writes:

It's no wonder that the Christianity of the left seems so superficial! When was the last time any of us heard a sermon from Al Sharpton that was based on a rigorous explication of the New Testament? How often do we hear from Jesse Jackson how his relationship with Jesus leads him to take the stances he does? Whatever you think of Jerry [Falwell] and Pat [Robertson], they make an explicit connection between Scripture and politics; at best, leaders on the left do so obliquely and too often, they don't do it at all.

Hugo is engaging in a little hyperbole here, of course; as Kazin documents, in many African-American Protestant churches at least, the link between scriptural authority and progressive politics is alive and well. But that, of course, simply highlights the real struggle that people like Hugo and I are going to have with many of our fellow leftists when it comes to articulating a properly liberal Christian agenda....because truly insisting upon the defining power of one's Christianity means that the "liberal agenda" must be shaped in obedience to a prior, not-necessarily "liberal" religious faith. (Kazin points to the influential African-American Baptist minister Walter Fauntory, a man with impeccable progressive credentials, whose commitment to the authority of the Biblical text has led him to oppose efforts to legalize same-sex marriages, at the same time while he attacks those conservatives who use, in his view, arguments over gay marriage as a distraction from the sort of progressive social and economic imperatives dear to his Christian heart, as they were to Bryan's.) In my view, if one entirely equates liberalism with the expansive and distinctly modern philosophical vision of fully emancipated persons, then Christianity can't be liberal, since Christian doctrine--like any doctrine about the divine worth holding--asks the human self to submit to a higher order of things, to be bound to the rule of a community, to obey something other than individual interest. You can certainly be, as I see things, a "liberal Christian," in the same way that one can be a liberal communitarian or nationalist: that is, one can take up one's identity and use it and think about it in ways that respect modern notions of individual rights and needs. As far as that way of thinking goes, I'm happy to embrace the label "liberal Christian," and I assume Bryan would have done the same. But that is because we can see something about liberality and reform and populism and egalitarianism in the Christian tradition, to which we are obedient. To make those commitments mere supplements to what Kazin harshly but accurately called the "standard stump speeches" of contemporary liberalism, however earnestly felt, misunderstands the contextual source of faith's power in the first place.

None of this will be easy to make happen, of course--it wouldn't be easy even if all progressives were in agreement with myself and Schwyzer (and Kazin), and it certainly won't end disputes between various liberal Christians themselves. Bryan's reading of Christianity was hardly uncontested during even amongst those who sympathized with his positions, and it wouldn't be today either, as there are many ways in which one can speak of being "obedient" to Christianity above and beyond any given political ideology. Hugo's friendly, faithful arguments with other Christians over what obedience to a tradition means is one such example (clearly, he and Fauntory would disagree on at least some points!); our own dispute over what being "pro-life" truly requires is another. I easily can imagine that more than a few secular liberals cynically but perhaps truthfully observing that since the sort of "grace and humility" which Hugo rightly notes this kind of political and spiritual articulation requires is not much in evidence in America today, maybe trying to inject it into the left is just bad idea. I, however, tend to think that the example of Bryan teaches us that we Americans are and always will be hungry for such religious "injections." The Republican party has been the sole beneficiary of such for too long; I look forward to the Democrats slowly but surely overcoming their distaste for moral authority and tradition and debate, and perhaps making room for a "revivalistic ethos" once more.

Unlovely Localities

I want to put down some thoughts that have been bumping around in my head lately. As usual, there are a variety of things which prompted them: this short post by Peter Levine, which touches on the importance of feelings of attachment or even "love" for where one lives as a precondition of civic engagement; this thoughtful piece in Prospect (via Political Theory Daily Review) by Gerry Stoker, on the need to deal with some of the less admirable aspects of mass democracy; and the study "The Local Roots of American Inequality," by Stephen Macedo and Chris Karpowitz (an old friend on mine), published in the latest issue of PS: Political Science and Politics. Macedo and Karpowitz synthesize a fair amount of data in order to persuasively advance their thesis that, as "political boundaries help shape citizens' interests and identities pre-ideologically: they demarcate communities of shared interests," any serious attempt to address inequality in America needs to begin with the one of the unfortunate consequences of our often intensely decentralized politics: the way in which the "crazy quilt" boundaries that shape jurisdictions in various localities across the country are as likely to discourage participation as enable it, and as likely to seal off citizens into distinct political and socio-economic subspaces (ghettos vs. "boutique suburbs") as draw them into common acts of self-government. None of these arguments on their own are earth-shattering; in some ways, the question of boundaries and attachments, of where and how legitimate and (we hope, at least) egalitarian civic action can take place, is one of the oldest questions in political theory. But when you think about community and populism as much as I do, it's hard to ever shake off any of these old questions entirely.

The bare empirical facts are incontrovertible: people participate in politics a lot less than they used to, and considering that concerted political action is the only way the needs and concerns of those outside the dominant social classes can ever manage to impact upon public affairs and the decisions of governing elites (much less ever manage to re-order who that governing elite is!), this is bad news for both economic and civic equality. The standard populist response has always been to, one way or another, seek to empower localities: bring governing power, and the subsequent creation of elites capable acting on behalf of a given public's interest, down to the local level. This usually requires, of course, something much more than institutional reform: if we don't have a cultural and socio-economic structure which supports and makes possible the kind of independence and education necessary for real political participation, then no amount of institutional reform is going to help--though it also goes without saying that institutional reform can play a role in cultural transformation or maintenance as well. But let's just stick with local governing institutions and jurisdictions themselves for the moment anyway. Even granting the populist argument, which I am inclined to do, it isn't clear what simply localizing politics accomplishes. Levine comments that one of the causes of the decline in civic engagement is "the rise of professional management"; well, as anyone could tell you, it's not as though local governments are free of professional turf-guarding. But perhaps the professionalization and complication of what in theory are localized and decentralized open political spaces is an effect, not a cause, of the decline of participation; perhaps the decline actually begins with the way many of citizens of modern Western democracies have themselves changed. Stoker puts it this way:

Politics has been infected by one of the dominant myths of our time: that the goal of life is self-actualisation. Politics as an exercise in collective decision-making has been unable to withstand the assault of a naive individualism. The idea that it is only through individual choice that we can express ourselves has reinforced a negative view of politics compared with other forms of decision-making that we experience....Making decisions through markets relies on individuals choosing what suits them. The genius of the market is in part that rationing is internalised--you calculate knowing what you can afford--but in the case of politics, rationing is externally imposed. You get what the system gives you. And democracy means that you can be involved in a decision that goes against you and still be forced to follow it. As a form of collective decision-making, politics, even in a democracy, is highly centralised compared to markets....

Centralised decision-making is a core part of our societies and politics is the mechanism for deciding what those decisions should be. We accept the prospect of coercion in order to live our lives more efficiently and in a way that meets our needs and interests....A propensity to disappoint is an inherent feature of governance, even in democratic societies--where power changes hands peacefully and citizens are protected by the law. But the disappointment has been getting worse in recent years for several reasons. First, politics seems more centralised, slow-moving and unsatisfactory when the economy and society around it are becoming more individualised and market-based. A generation ago many more people worked in big, collectivist organisations, even if they were in the private sector, and so had more of a sense of the necessary compromises and negotiations of political life. Second, compared with one or two generations ago Britain [and certainly American too] is less hierarchical and deferential, and the idea of equal, democratic citizenship is taken far more seriously. That has raised expectations. People believe more than ever that they are entitled to have their voice heard, yet for many reasons--among them the decline of class identities and greater affluence--fewer are prepared to make the effort required to play a meaningful part in the increasingly technocratic arguments of formal politics. People expect a veto right over a game that they no longer play.

In short, the overwhelming success--depending on how you define the term--of modern market economies has had the result of many citizens adapting themselves to habits of gratification, self-actualization, immediacy, individuation, and internalized (that is, nonpublic) rationalization. Decisionmaking has been reduced in the lives of too many of us to a perpetually self-generated and always self-revisable internal calculus: what do I want, and what do I want now? I am not saying the disciplines and expectations associated with free markets are flawed; I am saying, however, that market-appropriate behaviors are not appropriate to self-government. A relatively successful market economy, combined with a superficial sense of equality bequeathed to us through a naive understanding of one's "rights," results in a general indifference towards others so long as one's own rights and property are acknowledged; hence, the more the dominant segments of society are socially and economically homogenized (enjoying at least superficially an easily replicable level of prosperity across society), the easier it is for those citizens in that class to retreat within themselves and assume everyone else will do likewise. Our sensitivity to truly public matters decline, and our political muscles atrophy. Of course, the enormous leaps in personalized technology, which have allowed us to connect ourselves to networks of art and information that involve no collective determination or distribution, as well as the abandonment of truly involving civic requirements (like a draft), only reifies this process further.

If one thinks about the history of democratic politics broadly, one can see the roots of this process as far back as the Progressive era in the early 20th century. People moved to the cities, after all, because the economy was changing, and there was work and opportunities in metropolitan areas that lured millions at the beginning of the 20th century off their farms and over the oceans. At a certain point, the civic corruptions which came along with these human concentrations were too much; reformers moved in professionalize American politics, clean it up and demand greater "democratic" accountability from it. Their relative success, however, can be taken as proof of this process: self-government becomes harder the more one's life broadens, flattens out, and speeds up; the busier and more productive one becomes, across a larger and more homogenized socio-economic space, the more one naturally desires to divide one's life up between the pace of the market and that which you want to keep sheltered and private. So why not let professionals take charge of the town meetings? Either your individual economic strategies are failing, and you're being crushed beneath the wheel, or they're succeeding, in which case they're buying you personal pleasures the provide some refuge and relaxation. Who needs the headache of making political decisions regarding the sewer system when all that is the case?

Of course, all of this is relative; by almost any comparison, civic life in America and Britain was still a lot stronger at the height of early 20th-century reforms and centralization than it is today. Using Stoker's reasoning, however, that just tells us that a serious rethinking of local democratic politics is long overdue. He writes that democracy "need[s] to adapt to the new conditions and the new citizen, both more demanding and more apathetic....the era of mass participation politics is past." To me, that's a tragic conclusion--but I also have to admit that, while I can talk all I want about the farm, the lure the (once urbanized, now globalized) city and the modern marketplace is too strong: we live in a Blackberry world, and must seek whatever level of equality and democracy we can in a situation where almost every locality of size seems to want to assess itself in light of cosmopolitan possibilities. This is where Macedo and Karpowitz come in.

Macedo and Karpowitz don't bring much cultural criticism or political theory into their analysis of the situation, which is unfortunate; I think their piece would have been improved by an explicit (if necessarily brief) discussion of globalization and capitalism, and how the expectations associated with such simply entrench the "consumerist" model of metropolitan governance which they rightly criticize. But their argument, or at least the conclusions I draw from it, is strong regardless--one of the unfortunate results of the probably inevitable professionalization of politics in American cities is that it has perversely infected our commitment to keeping local government decentralized and "popular," with the result that there develops in short order in any metropolitan area a proliferation of governing bodies that respond primarily to a very small, very select elite, with no, as they put it, "cross-class communication and intercourse" between them. (Some of the facts they present are quite arresting: that a metropolitan area like St. Louis includes nearly 800 units of local government, and that it is not unusual for elections affecting the more specialized of these units across the country to have a turnout of around 5% of the relevant electorate, if that.) The privatized model of the modern democratic citizen encourages this balkanization, since many of us possess what is in affect a "secessionist" mentality when it comes to our localities--if some local jurisdiction bothers us, we use our disposable wealth to go build another one, an enclave (or an enclave within an enclave) that will separate us from portions of the population who threaten our home values or school systems or other public (but in fact for all intents and purposes now privatized) concerns. The result is that, too often, local institutions, far from raising one's political conscious, in fact lower it; they "widen differences and place the unpleasant realities of class [and social] disparity at a distance, while also insulating us from their impact."

What to do about this problem today, understanding it as a problem that was echoed in the late 19th century by the Populists and in the late 18th by the Anti-Federalists, and which is really one of the perennial struggles of modern politics? Probably one must begin by recognizing, as I am loathe to do, that there is only so much you can do by way of encouraging civic engagement and education outside of deep socio-economic reforms. Of course one can and should always encourage love and attachment; those virtues remain worth aspiring to. But I can't help but look at my own present home, the small university town of Macomb, IL. It's a fine place, a stable farming town with a good regional university. But I've been warned (and my experience over the Christmas holiday confirms this) that come summertime, close to half the population will flee; pretty much everyone associated with the university who can leave for the summer does--because, after all, what does a west-central Illinois farming town have to offer a university-educated cosmopolitan? The result is that a lot of civic development which could happen here doesn't, because social and economic resources--i.e., the people--aren't sufficiently rooted to this particular place. Sure, this is hardly a unique situation; it's just the flip side of all those vacation towns along the Atlantic coast or the Great Lakes--it's not a crisis, just the way things are. Which is my point: this is the way we live, the way modern, mostly financially secure democratic citizens want to live--when what we can achieve elsewhere, or just in the privacy of our homes, is no different or maybe even "better" in terms of material satisfaction than what we can achieve in concert with others, "exit" cannot help but appear ever so much easier and attractive to most of us than "voice." And if this is the state even small rural towns are in, one probably shouldn't expect anything different in larger localities. There's only so much that can be done, especially in the short term, to make people love their places more; so the only path left for civic-minded folk is to try to make our places a bit more lovely, or at least more lovable.

This leads me to pay special attention to the recommendations make by Macedo and Karpowitz which deal primarily with how municipalities are structured, and their willingness to suggest that "local political structures and the ideal of local control (or 'home rule')" can be abused. Vigilantly enforced fair housing laws are an obvious way to break up enclaves and induce cross-class political recognition; perhaps even more important are steps that would, on the one hand, unify the "fragmented nature of many metropolitan areas," while on the other hand opening up many special purpose government units to public participation. This is hard thing for someone committed to empowering people where they live, but any serious communitarian has to be constantly willing--as I wrote back when discussing school district closures and education reform in Arkansas--to renegotiate the limits and scope of one's affective (and thus participation-encouraging) community, or communities as the case may be. (Such is the genuis of federal or subsidiary arrangements: you can have educational collectivities on one level, and collectivities devoted to civil or national defense on another.) Localism--whether understood in republican or agrarian or communitarian or social democratic terms--is still a mostly true principle; but if the content which most modern free people are willing to accept as a politically involving "local concern" changes, then that doesn't mean you've lost the possibility of a local, communal context entirely: it just means that as the tools and rhythms of human social life change, the reach of that which can be made vividly and engagingly "local" about it has to change also. I'm not thrilled with all the plebiscitarian recommendations that Stoker, for one, makes--electronic voting and easier calls for referendums, etc. It seems to me that, at the same time that important arguments for a more populist democracy languish, we often allow ourselves to get caught up in faux-populist stunts that do more harm to democracy than good. But I suppose, in the name of making an egalitarian metropolitan localism more possible, I ought to be more willing to work with whatever good things my fellow liberated consumer-citizens just may love, than harangue them for what they don't.

Dog Days

We celebrated Chinese New Year at the Fox home last Sunday: hung up the paper lanterns, handed out some hong bao to each of the girls with a dollar inside, and feasted on shrimp and noodles, fried rice and pork dumplings. It was a good evening: welcome to the year of the dog!

Not that I've been in a festive mood lately. The month of January always seems to be a low point for both Melissa and I, and with the pain she's been in lately, this January has been particularly hard for her. My problem with the month might not be all that different from that felt by no doubt many, many others: you get all primed for the new year, you make resolutions and plans, and then suddenly the Christmas holidays are over and real life begins again and all those goals whither quickly in the winter chill. Academics, especially those of us coming back after the new year to a new semester, have an additional burden: whereas the summer gives you a long time to plan and prepare and build up energy, allowing you to (one hopes!) enter into the fall semester with both the season and the whole structure of your profession like a wind at your back, the spring or winter semester seems almost invariably to be something you and your students are stumbling into, groggy and unready, plagued on all sides by some unfinished project or something that you had, with foolish enthusiasm, put off from the previous semester and now have to rush to complete, just as all the machinery of the workplace gets back into gear. You get a couple of weeks into January, and already you're counting down the days until spring break.

This year has been par for the course so far: a couple of textbooks that all of a sudden turned out to be unavailable from the publisher (why they can't ever get this information to us before Christmas I'll never know), requiring syllabi to be rewritten on the fly; and then of course your rushed replacement books come in late, or not at all, or they send the wrong title. Colds and sore throats that move in sometime during the first week of January and appear determined to stick around until March, at least. Gas bills have gone through the roof and so we have to keep the house a little too cool for comfort; but the cold days keep getting interrupted by freak, 50-plus degree afternoons, which should be pleasurable except that the quick, subsequent return of cold gray skies only makes us more depressed, besides shaking up the atmosphere enough to give our viruses new interest in hanging around, just when we're hoping they'll get bored with our home's sterile atmosphere and shuffle off. The papers I need to read and essays I need to write and lectures I need to prepare pile up on my desk; they're dogging me, reminding me what this year means.

We've been making a go at academia for five years now; as I said last April, this one is almost certainly going to have to be our make-our-break year. I've thrown myself into my work here at WIU and into the job search in general with as much energy as I can muster (and don't my letter-writers--whom I've pestered endlessly and unforgivably of late--know it!), and through most of the fall semester I felt enthusiasm along with that energy. But the year ended with the future as ambiguously and frustratingly open as ever, and thus so far this year it's been slow going; I feel like I just need to keep my head low to the ground, tuck my tail between my legs, and get ready for bad news. I hope it's the January skies and Illinois winds that are getting me down (if it'd snow again, instead of just being cold, that'd be something at least). There's still plenty of time before March and April, before all the big events and big decisions of 2006 confront us; and before that time, I'm sure, they'll be some sunny days, and a spring to give us all a lift. Even in the midst of this already dog-tired January, I know--intellectually, even if I can't really feel it--that there are professional seeds beneath the ground, here and elsewhere, maybe growing, maybe getting ready to pop up. For the moment though, there's nothing to do but work through the winter, and wait.

It occurs to me that 2006 marks a personal Rubicon of sorts--as I was born at the end of 1968, and left home for college in mid-1987, this year will be the one in which I've officially spent more of my life on my own, and with my own family, than with my parents. Yes, I know, I'm a nut for these self-generated numerological milestones; I don't expect them to meaningful to anyone besides myself. But still, I have to think: I'm 37, I've got a smart and wonderful wife, three kids and one on the way, a job that I love that, admittedly, hasn't yet amounted to much, but probably hasn't hurt me much either. Despite all these Januaries, I've made it this far. And with this entry, I've written 100 posts on this blog. Not bad for an old dog.

On Blackberries, Canada, and Conservatism

Yes, it's another one of those big, summarizing "on" posts. But see what's the connection this time? I don't have a Blackberry, I'm not Canadian, and my relationship to contemporary conservatism is complicated, to say the least, so why the post?

Well, the post came together in my head through a column by John Ibbitson in The Globe and Mail (via Laura Turner), written on the day of Canada's federal elections last Monday. I followed the contest between Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party and everyone else fairly closely, at least for an American; we have close friends in Toronto, and Canadian politics and political thinking has always interested me. But there was another reason why I followed the campaign news from Canada, one that perhaps only makes sense in the context of my relationship to the rather paltry political continuum which marks the limits of most politics in the U.S.: in Canada, there are Tories, and I wish we had some here.

Except that the Conservative Party in Canada today, though called "Tory," isn't really, at least not in the way I like to use the term. What am I looking for? I'm looking for Red Tories in the original sense--the noble, old-fashioned "conservative" mix of religion, egalitarianism, self-government and national populism, which goes back to Benjamin Disraeli and John MacDonald, and found strong expression in Canada through the Progressive Conservative Party of John Diefenbaker and Robert Stanfield. We don't have Tories in the U.S. Oh sure, someone will occasionally pull the term out of their hat, but it has no real meaning in the overwhelmingly liberal (philosophically speaking) terrain of American society: the number of people who identify their conservatism with a need to protect social goods and promote social justice and virtue through community and state action is vanishingly small. It'd be wonderful to be able to vote for such a candidate someday, and so whenever an election is called in Canada, I find myself watching the Conservative party, hoping to see someone flying my preferred banner. That hope is mostly in vain though. Sure, the Canadian Conservatives are a lot more comfortable with social programs than American "conservatives" are; it's a much more "moderate" or even, in a crude sense, "socialist" party as far as that goes, and good for them. But for all that, Stephen Harper didn't run and win his minority government as a Red Tory; the fact is, he barely ran as a Tory at all. The Ibbitson column I mentioned above explains why:

[Whoever wins,] the Canada that Canada is becoming will carry on. The immigrants will continue to arrive by the hundreds of thousands each year; hundreds of thousands of native-born Canadians will leave, or be driven from, rural life. The Conservatives cannot stop these exoduses. And so either Mr. Harper will continue the transformation of his party, seeking to infuse the urban reality of Canadian society with a dynamic conservatism--and yes, the two can co-exist--or he will let his party and his soul become hostage to the resentful, rural redoubt that still lurks in the wings.

There is a posture of inevitability in this passage, which carries the assumption that "dynamic conservatism" is the only possible, respectful conservatism these days, the only conservatism that isn't the refuge of "resentful" losers out on the farm. Of course, what Ibbitson really means by dynamic conservatism is the "conservatism" which has been polished into a bright sheen by Republicans (and Democrats!) in the U.S. since the Reagan administration, if not earlier: that is, neoliberalism with some nice communitarian and localist rhetoric thrown in. It's all about the suburbs and the corporations, tax cuts and law and order, growth and trade. The farm, the community, the nation: those are all well and good, but they need to be taught their place. And let's not pretend that isn't an attractive package! The majority of Americans, and with every passing year more and more Canadians as well, have embraced in practice (but perhaps more importantly in principle) a liberal and liberated and urbanized version of modern life, where commerce is quick and homes are interchangeable and borders are open and change is constant and the internet connects everybody anyway. What we want is our neighborhoods clean, our tax burden low, our civic obligations minimal and our government out of our business. Of course, for many liberals this would be the point where my analysis breaks down: a lot of the political muscle behind this "conservatism," in the U.S. and, again, increasingly in Canada as well, comes from various Christian groups that have very strong opinions about how the government ought to involve itself in our (moral) business. Fair enough; certain elements of what might be called Toryism survive. But since for the most part they are not combined with anything like a genuinely populist and egalitarian socio-economic platform, the whole package of "dynamic conservatism" fails, at least in my view. But when liberalism--as expressed by both Canadian Liberals and American Democrats--mostly fails to make much of a communal or moral connection with the people (much less actually offer an alternative to the ideology of growth), all the people for the most part have left is the question of who to blame for high taxes and high unemployment and high crime, and the "dynamic" capitalists will always have a persuasive answer to that question, at least.

Yesterday, Laura McKenna shared another one those stories she is so good at getting to the heart of: how her husband is being pressured to spend even more time at work and away from her and the kids so that he can "get ahead," and how his boss wants him to carry a Blackberry--because, of course, there's so much important work to be done that you really ought to make sure you can read the latest e-mails from The Man at any time of the day. A typical tale of high-pressure corporate life, you say; true, but also, as Laura notes, another bit of supporting evidence for her conclusion that "corporate life is the enemy of the modern family." My friend and frequent antagonist Nate Oman takes exception to this conclusion: he's no ally of those who embrace the "super-turbo-charged-24/7/365-at-the-office" ethos which characterizes so much of modern corporate capitalist practice, but doesn't think the Blackberry supports such--on the contrary, he sees the Blackberry, and the world of constant and interchangeable information which it is just one very small part of, as a triumph of networks over hierarchy, a liberation of energy and activity (and time) which has torn apart the old socio-economic contract in favor of a much more meritocratic one. He admits that a "a reward system based on results" is more competitive, less secure, and less forgiving that the old system, but as it is also more "flexible," perhaps it is, ultimately, even more friendly to families than all that came before. (Or at least, that's what I read you as saying, Nate; no doubt you'll correct me if I'm wrong....)

The modern world is, practically by definition, a flexible one. As political revolution, social atomization, and technological innovation makes for ever more options and opportunities, all we individuals want is to be better able to respond to it, to go with its flow, to bend with it. The old Red Tory idea--and it's not just theirs; it's an idea that existed at the heart of practically every serious populist or egalitarian movement of the past three hundred years--was that, of course, we need flexibility....but we also need to make sure everyone is guaranteed a place, a home, a society, a space beyond the pace of the market, wherein they can put down roots and so be able to bend without breaking or being bowled over. No one who isn't psychopathically libertarian can honestly deny this, not even the neoliberals who call themselves "conservative" today. And so in America the Republicans associate themselves with the religious right, and at manage to keep various family values issues on the table; and the Democrats (despite the wishes of some of their big-city blue-state mandarins) keep trying to keep farmers and unions and those concerned about consequences of globalization politically viable. And in Canada, the Liberals rightly defend their country's attempt to make health care a duty of the whole; while across the aisle at least the Conservative government will presumably put a stop (for a while, anyway) to now ex-Prime Minister Paul Martin's desperate last-minute promise to get rid of the "notwithstanding" clause in the Canadian constitution--supposedly a threat to rights of individual Canadians everywhere but in fact one of the truly and admirably localist (or at least regionalist) aspects of Canadian politics. So yes, there are still options for populists out there; some good compromises can sometimes be made, here and there. But for the most part, whatever their more superficial political differences, the way Nate sees the world is probably about the same way John Ibbitson sees the world--and, on the basis of the evidence, it's a way of seeing the world that Stephen Harper has little problem committing himself to. I bet he carries a Blackberry.

On Culture, "Contamination," and Cosmopolitanism

Well, it's January 6, Epiphany. As good a day as any to kick free of the old year and get on with the new one, wouldn't you say?

Kwame Anthony Appiah's NYT Magazine essay from last Sunday, "The Case for Contamination", has received a fair amount of praise in the blogosphere, but little actual discussion. That probably is mostly a function of the fact that it appeared on January 1, and most of us are only now slowly getting our blogging muscles back into shape after the holidays. But I'm sure it's also at least partly a function of the fact that most of the blogosphere is probably already pretty comfortable with Appiah's basic cosmopolitan thesis: most bloggers, just like most modern inhabitants of the Western world generally, are philosophical if not political liberals, believers in above all individual liberty, and quite willing to agree that notions like "culture" and "authenticity," while all well and good in their place, are basically problematic if anyone starts using them in such a way that might actually involving the restricting of certain choices or the disciplining of certain desires. So when Appiah argues that all cultures are essentially "contaminated," and that such contamination is a good, he's essentially arguing for free trade and liberalization and diversity and who is to disagree with all that?

Well, I'll disagree with at least some of it. Not all of it, by any means; Appiah is a serious philosopher, and his book The Ethics of Identity was a serious contribution to the debates over liberty, culture, community and identity. The argument he made in that book--for a "rooted cosmopolitanism," wherein states (which Appiah takes much more seriously than nations) should be expected to make use of extant cultural resources in order to mold citizens into persons with both healthy particular identities and a robust appreciation for the tentativeness of such--has clearly contributed to the more popular argument he appears to be making in his new book, Cosmopolitanism. The vision of cosmopolitanism he presents in his NYT essay is an attractive one. He goes to lengths to distinguish his cosmopolitan position as a "humble" universalism, one based as much on doubt about differences as it is on an assurance of sameness, and thus distinct from the "neofundamentalist" universalism of radical Islamists (or Christian theocrats, for that matter), and he connects that to an interesting and careful argument about how cultures intermingle and adapt. It is a fine bit of writing. But the first few sections, I think, betray a major presumption on his part that I just can't accept.

Appiah insists that so long as you take individuals and not groups as "the proper object of moral concern," it is obviously correct that preserving practices in such a way as to discourage individual "contamination" is both wrong and foolish, because "people are entitled to options." Let people choose to be tribal if they want: just make sure they don't have any obstacles in the way of their choosing. Very broadly, this position is the same as Will Kymlicka's "liberal culturalism": we need to protect cultures insofar as some people might want to choose to partake of them for the sake of constructing their own identity; hence we need positive action to support various cultural practices, but we must avoid negative or protectionist actions that claim to act on the basis of the "purity" of those practices as they are actually lived. (Appiah sees this as the difference between "preserving culture," which he's all in favor of, and "preserving cultures," which he opposes.) When you look at it that way--when you allow yourself to be carried along by metaphors like "purity" and "contamination"--then Appiah's argument seems not just strong, but pretty eminently reasonable. Cultural enclaves are "distinct islands of homogeneity." Everyone wants at least a few of those around--every Scottish groom wants the option of buying a good old-fashioned authentic kilt to wear to their wedding, and so we ought to see if it isn't possible to make sure kilts remain available. But if it comes down to actually forcing people's choices to negotiate around the imperative of preserving these islands of kilt-makers and their kilt-making practices....well, then it's just not worth it. As he writes, regarding Asante farmers:

When my father was young, a man in a village would farm some land that a chief had granted him, and his maternal clan (including his younger brothers) would work it with him....Nowadays, everything is different....Once, perhaps, you could have commanded the young ones to stay. Now they have the right to leave--perhaps to seek work at one of the new data-processing centers down south in the nation's capital--and, anyway, you may not make enough to feed and clothe and educate them all. So the time of the successful farming family is passing, and those who were settled in that way of life are as sad to see it go as American family farmers are whose lands are accumulated by giant agribusinesses. We can sympathize with them. But we cannot force their children to stay in the name of protecting their authentic culture, and we cannot afford to subsidize indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no longer make economic sense.

For Appiah, these islands of homogeneity--these sites of "pure" or authentic cultural practice--are invariably backwards: they lack modern medicines, technology, education. Losing one's "distinctiveness" means interacting with the modern world, and that allows for a new kind of distinctiveness: the variety and "contamination" that comes through individual choice, and that invariably means exposure to advanced material opportunities and goods. So, while modern globalization does cause some of these cultural islands to disappear, they are replaced by empowered individuals capable of choosing their own individual distinctiveness. Is contaminated diversity better than that which it replaced? Appiah says yes, because it agrees with his basic commitment to the individual--but more importantly (at least insofar as this essay is concerned, which is light on philosophy and heavy on telling anecdotes), because attempting to hold on to the previous kind is just way too cost prohibitive.

Which seems like a pretty realistic position. However, Appiah's quick and presumably "common-sensical" reference to economic realities in this situation is revealing. He notes the importance of the problem faced by those for whom he says we ought to feel sympathy--"they can't afford to do something that they'd really like to do, something that is expressive of an identity they care about and want to sustain....they're too poor to live the life they want to lead"--but then moves on, simply shifting forward in time: the real issue, according to Appiah, isn't considering what social and economic reforms might be involved in order to make possible the local preservation of various "islands" in the face of globalized media and capital, but just stopping various anti-cosmopolitans and anti-globalists from getting in a snit about what happens when the people on those islands get wealthy enough to choose to run around in Gap t-shirts if they so desire. Which, I freely admit, a great many of them will; I've known more than enough farming families in my years in the South and Midwest to testify that an awful lot of the rising generation always wants nothing more than to forget about their (in their minds') marginal lifestyles and join the mainstream. But that raw anthropological fact doesn't justify Appiah's elision of the issue at hand. What he's essentially doing in making that claim is suggesting that once we enter into an argument about the actual availability of cultural-economic opportunities, then we're not really talking about authenticity any longer, but distribution. And if maintaining a widespread distribution of family farming or kilt-making islands is really costly....well, hey, the argument for the irrelevance of authenticity to the present moment practically writes itself.

Except that it doesn't. Appiah makes the same mistake that so many liberals make when thinking about the cultural/communitarian/localist argument: they assume that, just because such an argument partakes of conservatism (which cultural preservation does), that it must be all about conserving some sort of purity. (Colby Cosh has some fun with this idea, not realizing its flaws, here.) Thus all you need to do is show that every cultural community has been contaminated by diverse human choices at one point or another--which is surely true--and you've won the argument: since it's both conceptually bizarre and socio-economically impractical to conserve all this (apparently fictitious!) purity, you embrace the marketplace of ideas as the only legitimate response. Appiah knows very well that cultures don't really work that way, yet he assumes that his opponents don't realize the same thing. (Granted, a fair number of them don't: there are plenty of honest to goodness reactionaries out there, who, say, really do think the 1950s were the way they appeared on "Leave It to Beaver" and honestly want to get us back to that point.) The "expression" of a culture--the fluid, evolving way in which the basic elements of a healthy community get enacted, critiqued, revised, defended or dropped, over and over again, every day--is inseparable from its authenticity. And this is what the better resistance to globalization and, yes, "contamination" is all about: not about defending a supposedly "pure" cultural content, but preserving the context wherein people ought to be able to work out whatever content it is they respond to. And so talking about the expressive capabilities of a community and the people within that community--and the economic empowerment and solidarity which goes along with making such necessary--is not a side issue to a more basic argument about what it means to protect a culture; it is that basic argument. (Realizing this point doesn't mean that opposition to cosmopolitanism automatically has a normative force which overrides all other public concerns; I haven't demonstrated that. I'm just saying that Appiah's argument benefits by making use of a metaphor of culture which makes it easy to think primarily of burdensome and static practices and modes of production, when I think the better argument is that "authenticity" is located in people's collective self-expression, which obliges to think about making sure that peoples are politically and economically involved in shaping their cultural practices, rather than just worrying about (and ultimately giving up on) any given cultural content.)

When Appiah gets into talking about how actual people all around the world have, in fact, responded to the increasing dominance of their disparate cultural contexts by American media and markets, he's on stronger ground. It's undeniable that a lot of anti-globalists replicate the old imperial sin of condescending to the natives: "pity the poor Zulu, his consciousness will be lost, for he cannot resist the power of 'Days of Our Lives'!" Appiah is right when he says that "cultural consumers are not dupes." This is true. But it is also true that if this is the only mode of acculturation available to any given Zulu--namely, consumption or rejection--then something important will have been lost nonetheless: the ability to believe in one's culture, to take it seriously as a substantive and particular resource. When Appiah talks about Israeli Arabs viewing an episode of "Dallas" and drawing from it a message "that confirmed [their belief] that women abused by their husbands should return to their fathers," I don't think you're seeing, contra Appiah's claim, people enabled in a critical engagement with and vivification of their own embedded beliefs thanks to the power of cultural contamination; I think what's happening is a bunch of Israeli Arabs are disconnecting their belief about abused women returning to their fathers from the matrix of practices and beliefs where it developed historically, and are instead taking it as a free-floating principle, to be rejected or embraced or modified however one may wish. In other words, it's not an immanent critique, but a dislocating one. Now, if what you really want is the sort of critical empowerment that will privilege the individual above all, then however you get there must be praiseworthy. And even if you don't want that (as I don't), let's not pretend that one can always tell the difference between an argument which breaks apart horizons and one which works within them. Appiah talks about cosmopolitans are "humble," and we anti-cosmopolitans need to be humble too. But, as a general principle, being suspicious of cultural interventions that seem to be mostly one-sided doesn't strike me as particular arrogant.

Ultimately, Appiah wants to defend a cosmopolitanism that backs away from strong universals, one wherein people can choose not to be cosmopolitan. Sounds good...but the way that wish is structured supposes that everyone already is, in some sense, cosmopolitan, and thus can plausibly choose not to be. I think that gets it backwards. My belief is that we all have to be in particular contexts if we're going to choose cosmopolitanism in the first place--which means we have to ask ourselves just how and how many contexts can be empowered and preserved. And that means going beyond Appiah and Kymlicka, because these contexts don't begin with their having been chosen; they begin with their being substantively manifest in the way people already are, depending on where they happen to be born and what language they happen to speak, which is a communal and not an individual feature of life. Hence, the French language laws in Quebec (which Appiah once criticized in a debate with Charles Taylor): if the people who choose to live there are not obliged, as a collective, to restrict how they speak, than within a generation of free individual "linguistic consumption," being a Quebecois will mean something entirely different than what it does now (if it means anything at all). Is this one of those "islands of homogeneity" whose expressive context isn't worth defending? I have no idea how you would judge that; maybe it isn't. I'm not pretending that there is some easy solution to the problems posed by the prior burden which cultural contexts place upon our ability to negotiate globalization. But Appiah's cosmopolitanism, ultimately doesn't allow for any such pre-emptive contextual negotiating or defending, and that isn't right either.