Monday, January 31, 2011

Concluding Response to Fea and Others: "Tradition" vs. "Traditionalism"

Here is my wrap-up for the month at Cato Unbound...








Saturday, January 29, 2011

150 Years of Beginnings in Kansas

One hundred and fifty years ago today, Kansas entered the United States as the 34th state. Though the violence of Bleeding Kansas had basically come to an end with the triumph of anti-slavery forces and the writing of the Kansas Territory's fourth and final constitution, the Wyandotte Constitution, in 1859, it wasn't until Kansas was formally admitted to the Union (something that only became possible because pro-slavery senators from southern states were vacating their seats as their states seceded, allowing the bill recognizing that constitution as legitimate to pass) that the whole bloody beginning of Kansas truly came to an end. And then, of course, the Civil War officially began a little more than two months later. What a way to start.

There's much debate and not a little controversy over John Steuart Curry's famous mural of John Brown, and his vision of Kansas as a place when began in the midst of violence and strife. Curry was somewhat ambivalent about his status as a "Regionalist" and a "Kansas artist," and those who sponsored Curry as a muralist for the Capitol building didn't care for his employ of violent imagery to express the extremes and strife which Kansas seemed to carry with it right from the start. But the power of his artwork has endured all the same, and now continues to encapsulate the idea that this state is often one of sudden, perplexing, even violent contradictions. At the very least, Curry's work recreates what the rest of the country, as the Civil War began, no doubt thought about Kansas: as a battle ground, or better as a testing ground, out from which the most desperate measures of the struggle over slavery emerged, beginning with John Brown himself.

Kansas has its peaceful, humble, quiet side, of course; in fact, given the state's plain topography and long distances, such quietude is far more frequent than the reverse. We're a state of sunflowers and prairie grasses, of wheat and sorghum and cattle, of Laura Ingall Wilder's Little House on the Prairie and the cowboy song "Home on the Range". We love it here, and others do too. But then, sometimes tornadoes blow though, whether literal or metaphorical. Such storms--such violent contradictions, such passionate clashes--can and do happen everywhere, of course. But it can perhaps be said with some particular historical truth that you need to be especially attentive to them here. We started out that way, and we haven't seemed to have entirely shaken free of that beginning yet.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Vacation"

So, we're in Hawai'i. Will that stop Friday Morning Videos? Not on your life. And what could be a more appropriate tune for where I stand this morning than this?

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Further Response to Tushnet: Who Talks About Tradition?

Eve Tushnet has a couple of additional interesting comments on the Cato Unbound; my reflections on the first of them are here, and below.


Tushnet asks a truly fascinating question in one of her latest responses: "Why is marriage the only area of contemporary politics in which tradition is used explicitly as a justification?" The question is fascinating even though the assumption that lies behind it--namely, that outside the current argument over same-sex and traditional marriage, no one is making use of tradition in public debates--isn't, in fact, true, as she herself qualifies towards the the end of that same post. John Fea gave an example of the members of the community of Chesterton organizing to preserve the tradition of a local tea party commemoration there, and I could add two or three examples from Wichita, KS, where I live, as well.

For example, our local College Hill neighborhood has for years put together an enormous Halloween carnival. "Trick or Treat Street" draws over 4000 participants from all around the city (including my family and I). The local police used to provide traffic direction, but as the event grew in size, Wichita Police (which, like every government body these days, has had to look to cut costs) said they couldn't afford to pay all the overtime for the needed officers. The call went up around the neighborhood, and a fund was set up to cover the costs. Some grumbled, not wanting to pay, but they ultimately quieted their complaints. What argument shut them up. "Tradition!"

This example, like Fea's, speaks to a point he made: that it is the "local stories that give meaning to everyday life in small places" which we must be most worried about. Still, Tushnet is surely correct that if we restrict ourselves to thinking about "hot-blooded" policy debates (as she put it), the paucity of references to tradition is striking. For instance, why have invocations of "tradition" not played a role in the argument over abortion, with all the rituals and practices of couples meeting, conceiving a child, and welcoming that baby into the world? And we needed limit ourselves to the right side of our usual political spectrum: why haven't liberal egalitarians and leftists defended unions, the "living wage," and for the matter Social Security, as essential tools and structures that enabled families to sustain themselves on a single income and develop a secure way of living over the decades?

My instinct would be to turn to Polous's explanation of tradition's decline, but with an important twist. Yes, the notion of equality has rendered "authority" a complicated topic at best, when it hasn't dismissed it entirely. But that wouldn't provide us with an explanation as to why, in regards to marriage, the rhetoric of tradition (and its authority) is still persuasive to many. Critics of traditional marriage, or even just those unpersuaded by criticisms of same-sex marriage, not infrequently suppose that that rhetoric is a sham, a way to hide a general homophobia. But this isn't the case, or at least isn't always, I think. Perhaps the words "traditional marriage" still have some force in public debates because marriage is the one social institution that has not been fully equalized--or better, "mobilized."

My reference here is to Michael Walzer's classic essay "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." He talks about how difficult it is to articulate a communitarian position in the face of what he labels the "Four Mobilities" of modernity: geographic (we move around, chasing jobs, through a mostly homogenized and legally vouchsafed public realms), social (we feel little obligation to the economic or cultural world of our parents or peers, and in fact find the ability to advance along or create one's own path as something to be admired), marital (the divorce revolution, made possible in part by the sexual revolution which preceded it, it having been made possible by the Pill), and political (the consequences of democracy and technology have opened up all sorts of vistas of information, making it easy for us to change our minds and allegiances). I would suggest that geographic mobility is now essentially open to all (assuming the resources enabling one to participate in our national and international meritocracies); the same for social, and for political. But for marital mobility...that is not experienced equally. It mostly is, but not entirely. And the reason is obvious: we do not have a state which takes full responsibility for raising children (much less their conception and gestation--shades of Brave New World!), and that means the union of heterosexuals can, potentially, have...entanglements. We know this; we cannot wish it away, and despite all the trends and postures taken by some, most of the human race will probably continue to not want to wish it away. Hence, far more than questions about family planning and childbirth (as regards abortion), or about job security and stability (as regards economic well-being), perhaps the authority of tradition continues to pull on many Americans, while tradition in other contexts is something we've moved away from, however regretfully.

Of course, my examples above show that we haven't all moved away from the rhetoric of tradition entirely; we're quite likely to be moved by it, or even to become contributors to it ourselves, when we're dealing with something small, something local, something face-to-face. But when asked to weigh in on "hot-blooded" issues, things are harder. In regards to abortion, we think about our own daughters, and the mobility we hope for them; the rhetoric of tradition seems weak, and we turn to other arguments (assuming we even do). In regards to trade and outsourcing and wages, we may squawk and complain, but more often than not our inner libertarian, looking to keep our economic mobility equal to everyone else's, comes to the fore, and the appeal of socio-economic traditions of the past doesn't touch us. But the potentially entangling responsibilities of marriage perhaps touch us still. Given how thoroughly the sexual and technological (and economic) revolutions I mentioned above have force people to adapt themselves to entirely different cultures of marriage, it's an open question how much longer the many years of heterosexual fine-tuning in regards to marriage will continue to carry any traditional authority. Certainly many churches and other organizations are working to prevent that from happening, but they may be fighting the losing battle.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Response to Poulos: On the Authority of Tradition

...and here is my reply to both of Poulos's responses (so far!).


Poulos's wonderfully rich response (and his second one too!) in some ways might be taken as having anticipated and directly contrasted my previous reply of John Fea, with my talk about the "democratic input of the people" and the "civic order"; he suggests that what truly threatens traditions is the sense of authority-denying equality which has been to a degree an inevitable consequence of the creation of a civic order which respects the democratic individual. His use of both Tocqueville and Nietzsche in exploring this idea only raises the stakes even higher: if equality, and the resulting doubting of authority, is the true cause of traditions decline in the modern world, then perhaps the roots of this problem is as old as Christianity itself.

Poulos's question is thus a challenging one: that perhaps "tradition," far from being an interpretive and participatory creation, one which arises via the active subjectivity and involvement of all who are touched by and enlisted into a particular, significant belief or practice, is actually fundamentally aristocratic, bespeaking an authority which is to be responded to...and which has been on the defensive ever since the message of the radical equality of all human beings began its liberating, and confusing, work. Poulos's comments about marriage fit this perspective quite well; it isn't difficult to read the gradual evolutions and adaptations of the ideal of heterosexual monogamy over the centuries as a long retreat, with the authoritative ideal itself always casting about for one justification or another, as the aristocratic ethos which it once presumed weakened before the slow rise of gender and economic egalitarianism.

This is an abstract and theoretical argument, but it has immediately relevant applications, as Andrew Sullivan's engagement with Poulos's concluding thoughts about the future of marriage in America makes clear. If Poulos is right, and the real issue is the question of authority (a question, really, about who or what, if anything, a democratically inclined people will fully accept as sovereign) then the compromise he gestures at--"the alternative may be a tacit agreement to keep two sets of cultural books, so to speak, with official and unofficial spheres of life largely replacing the customary public and private"--might be the only way to keep the aristocratic principle arguably contained within "traditional marriage" alive. Save marriage-as-an-acceptance-of-authority by separating marriage from the increasingly authority-absent civic order! It's a compelling compromise (and libertarians will love it). But I would prefer to see if formalizable, meaningful traditions might not emerge as the legal, social, and religious particulars of marriage continue to be hashed out through the breadth of our democracy, without any side calling for a full retreat or complete victory as yet. That sounds almost hopeful, I realize, and I suppose it is. If I am, it is because I'm not sure I can agree with Poulos's account of tradition's authority necessarily involving such an aristocratic acceptance.

Poulos, is his second response, notes my dissent from one of Tushnet's points:


and he concludes:

Eve proposes that community can have an immanent foundation; Russell rejects this.

Now perhaps there is simply some confusion here in how certain philosophical or theological terms are being use, but I'm not sure how Poulos comes to this conclusion. He may well be understanding me correctly, but if so, I'm not certain that could be discerned from my disagreement with Tushnet above. She suggested that certain practices, through their repeated performance, might themselves become authoritative simply through a process of accretion. I find this unlikely. Now, if Poulos is taking Tushnet to mean that a community of practice (her specific example was journalists going about their work) have within them a source of teleological or moral meaning which will be immanent to the performance of the work involved, then yes, I do reject that idea. (Though I do not think that is what Tushnet was talking about; I read her as stating that some institutionalized practices precede any authority entirely, and gain authority simply through repeated performance, and I disagree with that for the same reason I agree with her about brushing your teeth: just because you may always brush your teeth in a certain way doesn't make it a "tradition," because there's nothing social or authoritative involved, binding you or anyone else together.)

What is the relationship between authority, community, and tradition? I hold that, at some point through the history of a particular belief or practice, some one or some thing emerges or stands revealed in connection with it which those who hold to the belief or practice subjectively experience a sense of authority for. This could be at the origin of the belief or practice: Moses coming down from Sinai, speaking in the name of God. It could be a revelation that comes almost accidentally, a piece at a time. But whatever the case, there is not, I think, some foundational moment where authority become immanent to all subsequent performance of the designated beliefs and practices; the authority comes through and in its subjective recognition by those who come together as a community around it. That is the interpretive, revelatory work of traditions: a situating of the self in regards to something which comes along with a community of belief or practice. This subjective realization may take the form of acknowledging an aristocratic ideal being so communicated, but it is not as though that sense of authority was immanent to the tradition the very first time it was ever enacted.

I do not mean to reduce all traditions to a identical intellectual and experiential process; there is surely an immense historical variety in how these processes play out. The Puritan communities of 17th-century Massachusetts and the classical Confucian communities of Han dynasty China, for example, were both, in their own ways, profoundly traditional, with the traditions which bound those communities together being held as highly authoritative, but the experience of that tradition and authority was quite different. For Puritans, it was a process of recognizing the spiritual authority of congregational leaders, through accepting a covenant of grace which the Puritans held set them apart from other Christians. This was a highly unequal context--Puritan town meetings were not modern democracies--yet it still depended upon a uniform, participatory acceptance of that authority by all in the community. For Confucians, it was a process of adhering to a set of ritual instructions and performances, ones believed to have been handed down from the ancient Zhou. There was also a great of inequality in these communities--and yet, again, the actual binding authority of the rites was identified with the moralistic relationships and connections which the enacting the diverse roles and responsibilities specified by the rites (father, husband, teacher, servant, wife, son, minister, friend, etc.) instantiated. (I discuss these differences and similarities at length in my Philosophy East and West article here.)

Traditions should be preserved. Do we need to worry about preserving the authority of traditions, and perhaps separating them out from a democratic, anti-authoritarian civic order in order to do so? While I find Poulos's speculations about the authority of traditions challenging, I am not persuaded that the loss of an aristocratic, inegalitarian ethos (which hasn't been, it should be noted, a total loss) renders them incapable of doing their shaping, modeling, and binding work. The experience of authority through communities and traditions is not so dependent as he implies, I think, upon getting and keeping the foundations right.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Response to Fea: Preserving Communities and Traditions

To continue my responses to the ongoing business at Cato Unbound, here is my reply to John Fea's response...


I appreciate very much the thoughtful response presented by John Fea to my essay. As a historian, Fea is rightly concerned primarily with the civic traditions "that help to define our lives together." Given this focus, I fully agree with his distinction between "tradition"--the conscious, adaptive work of preserving and shaping the particular knowledge and practices of the past--and "traditionalism."

Of course, I use the latter term somewhat differently than he does, as I think we need a word to capture the disposition some feel (would that it more did!) towards identifying and honoring traditions; certainly that is the case with our family, and our affection for bringing holidays into our yearly calendar. (Coming up soon: Candlemas/Groundhog Day!) But the point still holds, whether we speak of traditionalism or, as I put it in my lead essay, Christopher Lasch's "custom": either way, it is ritualistic acknowledgment or action from which all active remembering has been dismissed, replaced with a static genuflection towards the past. Such an attitude denies the democratic input of the people actually living those traditions, and will likely render them things many people will choose to flee from as boring or demeaning, rather than as a source of enrichment.

Do Americans have a particular problem with making that distinction? Perhaps. Fea's comments suggest such, and by so doing answer his question to me: "why [is] bothered by Eric Hobsbawm and the “invention of tradition” argument...[d]oes it really matter whether traditions are products of modernity?" It matters because--particular in a country so smitten with the idea of itself as something new, something exceptional--the belief that traditions are "merely" modern (re)constructions makes it easy for Americans (and real, most moderns as well) to assume they are dead things, only have the appearance of providing guidance and meaning because an artificial life arbitrarily pumped into them by self-interested parties. (As how some have argued, misunderstanding the interpretive work their evidence represents, that "Christmas" was invented by a collusion between greedy shopkeepers and a nervous clergy; see Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas for more along these lines.) It is important to challenge this idea, with its presumption of a non-subjective, non-interpretive past; only by so doing can people reflect with respect upon their own constant reliance upon and adjustment of the traditions they make use of.

Fea is also rightly worried, I think, about the civic spaces and remnants that ground and give specificity to our traditions--parks, museums, monuments, holidays, parades, heritage education, and all the rest. In a world of property and commerce, he asks whether "we will really want to trust the treasured traditions, stories, and markers of our collective or group identities to a capitalist market?" My own anti-capitalist inclinations tempt me to reply with a resounding "No!," but I think a more tentative "no" is perhaps more helpful. The information sharing which markets make possible is not to be discounted; more than a few historical sites and civic rituals have been helped to flourish by seeking private sponsors and commercial investment. But such attempts to turn to the market and purely private donations will be, as Fea rightly notes, extremely hard on "the local stories that give meaning to everyday life in small places"--the lure to leverage one's financial commitment towards those traditions likely to give greater "return" (whether financial profit, mass media exposure, or just numbers of those involved) will be too great for most to resist. The result will be tiny outposts of memory--like Fea's own delightful and moving story about the "Chestertown Tea Party"--likely dying away. Regional and local sources of traditional knowledge and practices, therefore, are the ones most threatened today, and the ones that those inclined to honoring tradition ought to most vigorously seek to establish more deeply, formally, and solvently, in the civic order.

The Day the Poet Came to Town

Fifty years ago today (or at least, that's the best guess that most musical scholars and the subject's own reminiscences can come up with), on January 24, 1961, Bob Dylan--who'd left his given name Robert Zimmerman behind at college in Minnesota--arrived in New York City. That very day, he started hitting the folk clubs in Greenwich Village; the photo above may well have come from a set he performed later that very day at the Café Wha?, with Fred Neil and Karen Dalton, who were once pillars of the early 60s New York folk scene. Maybe the 60s had already begun with the Beatles discovering their own potential in Hamburg, or with the election of the self-consciously youthful John F. Kennedy to the presidency. But Bob Dylan's arrival in New York City deserves as much of a shot at the "start of the 60s" title as either of these, or any others for that matter as well.

I'm writing this from Hawai'i, and on the flight over I finished this book by Sean Wilentz. It's wonderfully informative, often fascinating, idiosyncratic, deeply historical, and thoroughly opinionated; with the possible exception of that last one, those terms describe Dylan quite well as well. (Not that Dylan himself is without opinions; only that as an artist, rather than a crusader or a critic, he's approached opinions as things better explored and then discarded, rather than long held to.) Wilentz jumps around Dylan's career, spending a great deal of time on both certain widely acknowledged landmarks (like the recording of Blonde on Blonde in 1966) and some mostly unknown little moments (such as his composition, recording, and abandonment of the classic song, "Blind Willie McTell"). Wilentz persuasively (most of the time, anyway) connects Dylan's ideas and imagery to random American moments ranging throughout the whole of the 20th century, and beyond: the "music for the masses" folk movement inspired by the Popular Front left of the 30s and 40s; the Beat poetry and attitude of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg of the 50s and 60s; the hymnody of the rural white South, and much more. He also skips over a whole lot--Dylan's Christian phase gets relatively little attention, and neither does his time with The Band. (And he calls Dylan's association with The Traveling Wilburys a basically a joke and a lark, while I can't help but think it was anything but.)

Still, in the midst all of those reflections and reminiscences (Wilentz himself, whose childhood was spent near Greenwich Village in the early 60s, appears both as a teen-ager and an adult more than once as part of Dylan's story), the books underscores one overarching point: namely, that Dylan's protean quality as a poet, as a singer-songwriter, as a "minstrel" and performer, encapsulated and opened up a crucial transformation taking place during the those years, exactly a half-century ago. The raw material, the ideological resources and artistic and musical fundamentals, the capacity to both make something new and to quickly tear it down, abounded in the rich, ambitious America of 1961. Take a smart, insanely talented, deeply self-critical shapeshifter from Minnesota, let him listen to both early rock and roll and postwar jazz and pop (Dylan confessed his early love for both Little Richards and Bing Crosby, both Ricky Nelson and Frank Sinatra), then shatter his world with Woody Guthrie and the power of folk music and the blues, and let him go. Let him go to to New York, and begin 50 years of becoming a symbol and a savior and a traitor to one way of seeing the world, one way of politics or art or belief, after another. His early sarcastic insistence that he's really just a "song and dance man" can't really be believed, any more than we can call the 60s "just another decade"...and yet, isn't it the truth as well? It just happened, like anything happens, as Dylan himself put it.

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable in Dylan's oeuvre as I'd like to be--but then, who is? There's just too much of it. And I got into Dylan too late anyway; I didn't really start listening to him until about 10 years ago, and that mainly because good friends kept calling me out on my ignorance. If I was asked today, what slice of all the sometimes harshly accurate, sometimes dreamily romantic, poetry that Dylan has given America over the past 50 years do I like best...well, I just couldn't say. "Political World"? "Desolation Row"? "Just Like a Woman"? "Tangled Up in Blue"? "With God on Our Side"? May I'll just stick one of the most American of his compositions, "My Back Pages": the story of once being certain, and then becoming confused--and paradoxically, getting younger all the while. (Besides, I love this all-star performance of the song.)

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Friday, January 21, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "She Bop"

Well, given last week's video, I figured it was only fair to give this over-the-top gem it's due as well.

The dude on the motorcycle at 1:14 totally looks like Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Un Crocodile!

This is making the rounds today, and not for the first time in the history of the internet either. But who cares? We can never be reminded enough that, whatever the faults or limitations their political or economic situation, the children which the French produce are far superior to our own. (H/T: BoingBoing.)


To follow up on what's been happening on Cato Unbound: Eve Tushnet, John Fea, and James Poulos have all posted thoughtful responses to my essay, which I really appreciate: they both clarify and challenge my ideas about tradition. My first reply, solely to Eve, has gone up today; hopefully, a reply to John and James will go up soon as well. In the meantime, here's a copy of my response.


Eve Tushnet's response to, and extension of, my argument about traditions and traditionalism makes wonderful reading. She is especially acute about one of the primary implications of my argument--namely, that once one rebuts the attempt to reduce traditions to an historical arbitrariness which ought not, to use Tushnet's term, "entangle" us, then one is presumably obliged to take the next step: to deal with that recognized entanglement, to judge it and its several (themselves always shifting) parts, and to ask oneself exactly how and how much and when and where one ought to sacrifice something--a choice, a preference, a resource, a desire--on its behalf.

She opens up this implication by way of an observation by Paul Kahn, who wrote that "Recognizing that there is no subject without parents, for example, hardly tells us how we should view our parents." Charles Taylor once made a similar observation, about what he saw as the frequent confusion between "ontological issues" and "advocacy issues" in the liberal-communitarian debate. Acknowledging the entanglement of our subjectivity in the particular meaning-construction of someone or something else (our parents, the English language, the holidays on our calendar, etc.) does not, in itself, tell us how to deal with our parents, our language, our holiday traditions; as Taylor put it, "Taking an ontological position does not amount to advocating something," though at the same time "the ontological does help to define the options which it is meaningful to support by advocacy." [Taylor, "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate," in Liberalism and the Moral Life, Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 161] It is here that we see the effort to get clear on traditions most often challenged by some libertarian or individualistic thinkers of a philosophical bent. While many--perhaps most--of this disposition may see no reason to dispute the way their subjectivity is enmeshed in, perhaps even constituted by, histories and cultures and traditions that necessarily shape and even obligate them in certain ways, more than a few are leery of the kind of advocacy that such an ontological allowance may, and often does, potentially bring along with it. Hence their not infrequent reliance upon the claims of Hobsbawm which I criticized in my essay, asserting that, as what we are enmeshed in is little more than a "constructed" reification of some historical moment, its claims are arbitrary, and therefore can (and, it is usually implied, should) easily be escaped. In rejecting that "bizarrely simplistic, ahistorical" argument, as Tushnet rightly puts it, I am unavoidably placing a follow-up question before us: how should we think about, and respond to, these larger things?

This follow-up will inevitably take us, as Tushnet titled her response, "beyond liberalism." Liberal culturalists such as Will Kymlicka, as I noted before, would almost certainly dissent from this: as they view traditions as resources that individuals may embrace or reject as they seem fit, they would likely argue that such follow-up questions can (and, again, should) be answered privately, without any shaping or obliging which extends beyond individual preference. But this is not the case, since the context of this follow-up concern--how to deal with the traditions we are entangled in--requires us to think about matters which cannot be fully articulated without reference to a community of others (both living and dead). Tushnet suggests that the matters entwined in the context of our responses to such traditions are things like beauty, love, honor, and suffering; I could add to that list pleasure, solidarity, and a sense of place and wholeness. Any and all of those potentially draw upon such a huge variety of media and measures that an authority of something or someone beyond one's own interest has to come into play; the act of interpretation practically demands it.

Tushnet thoughtfully presents tradition as that which gives substance to the often abstract authorities on whom we usually rely as we make judgments about how to deal with that which our culture, history, parentage, or calendar presents us with. I would quibble with her idea that a practice or institution might accrete traditions and thus gain authority thereby; it seems to me, rather, that some activities (such as certain religious rituals) are held as authoritative from their origin or from some stage in their process of origination (or transformation), and become something traditional to be passed down accordingly. Mostly though, her point about authority is well taken. It is the idea of authority, after all, which makes sense of the idea of obligation, shaping, and adherence. So, to move the discussion from the philosophical to the political, what might be authoritative understandings of things we love, honor, or wish to be in solidarity with, which traditions can, though associating us with others, "put flesh and costume" (to quote Tushnet again) upon?

An easy one to start with, since I am writing this on the day itself: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. In my essay, I made mention of the work of Sarah Hale, a 19th-century feminist who cajoled and corresponded with politicians, business leaders, and women's groups for years to get the national government to officially declare Thanksgiving Day a holiday, with all the legal and economic ramifications such a declaration inevitably had. Similarly, this January 17th was the 25th anniversary of the first public honoring of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, the result of years of activism by labor unions, civil rights groups, and Democratic politicians, who clearly understood pushing the holiday as a way to continue to distinguish their record during the civil rights movement from that of the Republicans. I remember the arguments both for and against the holiday which abounded during my middle and high school years in mostly white, mostly conservative communities in the American west; friends of mine from white communities in the South have similar recollections. Honoring Martin Luther King would challenge the solitary honor which George Washington had previously enjoyed in the federal calendar; it would oblige states to introduce unpopular concepts into elementary school curricula; it would require contorted balancing acts to satisfy various constituencies (creating a "Civil Rights Day" or the short-lived "Lee-Jackson-King Day" were just two ways different states sought to accommodate themselves to the national government's decision). Holidays, of course, are not generally occasions of high sacrifice, but still, on the level of school budgets, government payrolls, work schedules, and more, significant interpretation and adjustment is necessary. Taking the legacy, ideals, and impact of a single man, and using them to engage in an act of partisan construction, so as to force into the civic routine of the nation a set of traditions, however plebeian they may be, oriented around an important national memory of protest and struggle, was anything but an easy, individually obvious, static operation; it was, and still remains, a dynamic, collective, contentious act–as most any holiday should be. But the result is that a reference point for remembrance in now part of our calendar, and we–or at least, those in sympathy with the aim of that remembrance–are empowered thereby.


One “conservative” answer has been to describe marriage traditions as essentially eternal, absolute, and static; that the legal recognition of same-sex marriage would be a change so great as to render completely pointless all the moral meaning and guidance which they once provided to people attempting the flesh out the abstraction that the marriage relationship makes possible. Hence, same-sex marriage is simply incoherent. But that answer fails to recognize the interpretive, constructive, and subjective history of work involved in the authority behind any tradition; it is weak, because it leaves itself open to Hobsbawmian claim that since something isn’t eternal, it must not be too meaningful either. The harder, but necessary, argument for those whose religious beliefs lead them to oppose same-sex marriage, is to recognize that the meaning of a tradition cannot be contained solely in its repetitive, customary performance; it has to be revivified through constant acts of judgment that take into consideration the lives actually by its practitioners. There is no good reason to believe that traditions which take, and radically remake, our understanding of how one can make substantive the abstract, collective, even “illiberal” matters at the heart of marriage may not emerge, and do so in continuity with older understandings of those same traditions. Of course, that emergence will almost certainly be divisive, and will likely be contested; arguably, this very process has been underway in the United States for multiple decades now. And the end result is anything but guaranteed. But those who imagine traditions could be at all otherwise–from either point of view–are fooling themselves, I think.

The Torch and the 60s, Fifty Years On


We might as well accept it: we're in for a long run of fiftieth anniversaries in the months and years to come. With our media, our culture, our economy, and our politics so thoroughly stamped by the Baby Boomer experience, it could hardly be otherwise; "the Sixties" looms large in all of us, whether we admit to it or not. And as far dating the beginning of the Sixties is concerned, the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inauguration as president, with his stirring--yet, I think, also strangely distant--address, is a better anniversary than most.

The news has been filled this week with commemorations--including some from some of my favorite bloggers and writers--of the life and work of Sargent Shriver, who died on Tuesday at the age of 95. A Kennedy brother-in-law who founded the Peace Corps, and went on to a life of enormous accomplishment in government and public service--including constructing much of President Johnson's War on Poverty in the years after Kennedy's assassination--he never won political office himself. He ended up as the vice-presidential candidate on the chaotic 1972 Democratic ticket with George McGovern, and they were crushed by Nixon. That was a terrible loss, not just because of everything that happened in the Nixon White House afterward, but also particularly for Christian socialists like myself: what would have become of our national political debates, I wonder, if we'd had a couple of unconventional, deeply religious Democrats like McGovern and Shriver in the White House when Roe v. Wade was decided? But perhaps that's the wrong way to think about things: after all, by the early 70s the revolutions in how we think about government, and how we think about ourselves--revolutions which JFK, whether he intended it or not, was central to the beginnings of--were more than a decade underway.

I've never had particularly strong feelings, one way or another, about President John F. Kennedy. His short presidency has always been, for me anyway, far too much a phenomenon best known through myth, and far too obviously serving as a kind of synecdoche for an entire era, for me to develop anything so pedestrian as an "opinion" about it. Can one have an opinion about a moment in time? About his predecessor, Eisenhower, and his successor, Johnson, I can talk about the significance of their policies, their perspectives, their leadership style and their political impact. But with, not really, I can't, not with any confidence anyway. He's too large, and therefore too indistinct, for any of that. Through looking at the life and career of Martin Luther King, for example, I can particularly situate and judge JFK and his actions in regards to certain trends and movements and transformations, but only momentarily; as soon as I turn the page, he's gone, ghosted away into a world of symbols, into "the Sixties" and all that such a reference means. Much of it, of course, from the bureaucratic idealism of the Peace Corp and the War on Poverty (a progressive, governmental idealism which Shriver's career exemplified), to the democratic and moral fervor of the civil rights movement and the early years of the Students for a Democratic Society, is admirable, whatever its complications and limitations. But the larger spill-over of that idealism, the heady, yet culturally undirected and in some ways self-centered legacy of Kennedy's concluding words--"that here on earth, God's work must truly be our own"--arguably gave a giant green light to an encompassing individualism, one which undermined the very collective language which his speech is most famous for.

There are worse fates for a president, to be sure, than to be reduced (or enlarged?) by history into a commodity, a symbol, a sign: a sign of youth, change, progress, and innovation, and eventually of lost causes, Baby Boomer corruption and obliviousness, sexual and social irresponsibility, and dreamy might-have-beens. We've been living with this contradictory legacy of 1960s (economic security giving rise to rebellious experimentation, radical challenges being sublimated into the socio-economic status quo, visions of progress revealing themselves to be pragmatic adjustments to almost seemingly predetermined results, lather, rinse, repeat) ever since. He was the youngest man ever elected president, and the one (despite the occasionally successful efforts of both Clinton and Obama) most obviously associated with a specific generational mindset. And the people of that generation knew that, at the time, as it was happening: as Norman Mailer put it in a long profile of JFK's journey to the White House in the November 1960 issue of Esquire, in electing Kennedy president America was "enlist[ing] the romantic dream of itself...vot[ing] for the image in the mirror of its unconscious." Forget all the other ideological accouterments of Kennedy's brief administration that on their own provide more than enough grist for myth-making and idealization (the celebration of the intellect and the arts, the manly and--for some--attractively irresponsible militarism and virility, the revived and revised expression of the familiar republican language of self-sacrifice and civic duty--"ask not what your country can do for you" and all that). His youth alone, his age alone, the sense of independence and liberation which is very appearance and words carried alone, did much of the trick.

And so, metaphorically, he lit a torch...and, of course, the torch continues to literally burn on his grave. Arguably, that thing we call the Sixties had really started the year before, when a group of ambitious young men forged themselves into what eventually became the dominant engine of the emerging world-wide youth-oriented pop culture and market economy. Just as arguably, a key ingredient of that culture--a critical and educated sharpness, combined with a self-indulgent, self-referential, self-mocking pretentiousness--was only just getting started (check back next Monday for more on that). And, of course, Kennedy's own brother Robert would emerge, towards the end of the 1960s, as perhaps the purest distillation of the confusing and contradictory images and legacy which his slain brother ended up laboring under. But John F. Kennedy himself was the essential ingredient, the catalyst that jump-started the simmering pot of America's postwar economy and public opinion and somehow built a bridge which took us from the Cold War to everything that came after. With the death Shriver, some would argue that we have finally, tragically, left that era--that bridge--behind us. I'm doubtful of that. That we've left the bridge Kennedy behind us is indisputable; no sane politician today could approach government work and the idea of citizen service with anything like the confidence which JFK exhibited fifty years ago (unfortunately, I say). But still, we can see the ruins of it in the rearview mirror. It's a huge, burning landmark, and I suspect we aren't likely to entirely leave its shadow for a long time to come.

(And no, in case you're wondering, I don't have anything to say about the canceled big-budget Kennedy miniseries...except that the image in the Youtube clip of Tom Wilkinson as patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Sr., draped with an American flag, kind of makes me giggle.)

Friday, January 14, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Relax (Don't Do It)"

I can't remember, much less find on the internet, any video quite as weird, offensive, and/or disturbing as last year's creepy masterpiece by XTC. But there is this:

Yes, this is the video banned by MTV and the BBC. Not sure why, since looking at it today, it seems to be a story of a bunch of roadies for a stage show of Caligula getting drunk and skanky. And then forcing some guy to fight a tiger. I don't know; maybe it's the fake Roman senator's thong underwear that did it. Anyway, here's the version most of you are more likely to remember.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Defend Billy Joel; Receive Your Punishment

I made the mistake of parading my admitted MOR colors on FB last night, speaking up for Mr. William Joel. My friend Dave Jenkins, a good man who tolerates the terminally unhip, sent me this as an object lesson:

Click at your own risk. Those teeth of his will bite.

When He's On, He's Truly On

Between him and his speechwriters, it was plain yesterday that the communicator we saw and heard in 2007 and 2008 is still around:

If President Obama was angry about right-wing rhetoric on Saturday--and he probably was--he and/or those close to him were smart enough (unlike me) to keep it under wraps, do some thinking and praying, and come out with a better, wiser view. Especially this:




As the Guardian newspaper reported, Obama "spoke less like a politician than a pastor or priest comforting a grieving community. The focus on those who had saved lives was an attempt to offer hope amid the sadness." Some don't like that; they look down upon or distrust political leaders trafficking in civil religion, in morality, in attempts to articulate something broader and deeper, to connect their fellow citizens to a religious and ethical narrative which they can identify with. And they especially don't like it when such attempts become institutionalized, ritualized. Well, I kind of like it. I like--and I know that in many ways this arguably runs against some of my own democratic beliefs--knowing that someone can still cut through the noise, and be "the adult in the room." I've no desire to ever be president, and I've no desire to ever stop commenting on and criticizing them, when I feel like doing so. But I do hope to be a little bit better at being an adult, and I'm grateful for every positive example of such I get.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Holy Cow

Just found this online. Man. Anyone have any idea when this might have happened?

And, am I right in thinking that's Tom Hughes, sitting between George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola on the right?






















Sunday, January 09, 2011

On Pretexts and Apologies

Yesterday, in reaction to the breaking news about the murderous rampage aimed at Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona, I was in an angry, reactive mode. That led me to make connections--even accusations, or something close to such--that were not, I would insist, necessarily unreasonable...but which were also irresponsibly quick, direct, and harsh. In doing that, I was wrong. In writing what I did, I became part of exactly what I was truly responding to: not the horrible news out of Tuscon (to which there was only one decent reaction, namely one of mourning and sorrow), but more largely the environment within which this shooting happened to occur. I am torn and frustrated by what I see as the viciousness and foolishness which I hear on the airwaves and read over the internet; I want to dismiss it, but when I hear people calling for "revolution," I start to wonder if they aren't serious, and it makes me wonder if it isn't irresponsible not to get angry and respond in kind. And unless I'm equally serious in what I claim to know, then I should be a lot less quick to come to that conclusion.

Anyway, the fact is I used a tragic event as a pretext to let a lot of my fears and worries run wild. Those fears and worries, I maintain, may not be unjustified; however, using the attempted murder of a congresswoman--an attempt which resulted in the death of six other people--as an excuse to get hysterical about them is. All of which, I suppose, just goes to show why I'm a lowly blogger, while James Fallows gets paid the big bucks:

Shootings of political figures are by definition "political." That's how the target came to public notice; it is why we say "assassination" rather than plain murder. But it is striking how rarely the "politics" of an assassination (or attempt) match up cleanly with the main issues for which a public figure has stood....

[T]he train of logic is:
3) the political tone of an era can have some bearing on violent events....[T]he anti-JFK hate-rhetoric in Dallas before his visit was so intense that for decades people debated whether the city was somehow "responsible" for the killing. (Even given that Lee Harvey Oswald was an outlier in all ways.)....

We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did....But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery....It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload."

If it really is the case that one of the consequences of this ugly, evil incident is that people calm down a little bit, that political vitriol may moderate some, then I suppose that would count as a silver lining. There may be some evidence that this will in fact be a consequence; yesterday, a leader of one Arizona Tea Party commented that "When we talk about Barack Obama, we've got to be clear, it's not personal. When we say he's destroying this country we are not saying he's doing it out malicious intent and a desire to cripple us. He has good intentions and he's wrong. I worry when that gets lost."

I wasn't part of that possible moderation yesterday, and I apologize for that. I don't apologize for my worries and fears--I'm pretty sure I can defend them in an argument--but neither would I would expect anyone worried and fearful about the things I consider valuable and worth fighting for to apologize for their views. I know people--good, devout, smart people, some of whom I consider to be real friends--who probably felt themselves caught up in my pretexts and accusations yesterday, and that makes my words all the more in the wrong.

Let me finish by quoting something that another friend, Matt Stannard, who is frankly a lot better at this public communications stuff than I, put on Facebook yesterday:

All ad homs aside: 1. Today was a sad, tragic day. 2. This type of violence happens all the time in many parts of the world; we should oppose it no matter where it occurs. 3. I appreciate that so many friends on all sides have been hanging out here arguing with/against me. To me, a good argument is like a good hug. I really love all of you. Let's all work on making the world more just and peaceful any way we can.