January 2004

Tyler Cowen excerpts this NYT piece by Barry Schwartz on whether we have too many choices. I found titibits like this pretty damn obvious:

• Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf.

If you’re optimizing with respect to jam, then an increase in your number of choices increases your search costs. If it looks like the cost of sorting through all the jam is going to be fairly high, and your desire for jam isn’t urgent, you’re likely to just walk out jamless. You don’t have to be optimizing, etither. More likely you’ll be happy with anything that passes some threshold. But thresholds like these tend to be context sensitive (the worst jam at Whole Foods might be better than the best jam at Giant, but in both cases, you may aim for the middle of what’s on offer), so you won’t be sure where it is until you get a sense of your options. This, too, costs.

Tyler presents these cases as “brickbats” for libertarians and economists. Well, OK. To me, this points to the economic importance of “editors”. If people get turned off when the choice set gets too big, but people will buy something in the set if its smaller, then the money is in packaging smaller choice sets and knowing who to present them to (like the shoe salesman Tyler mentions). To some extent, this is precisely the difference between a boutique and a department store. Part of what you’re paying for in a boutique is the editorial skill of the buyer & salesperson. The trim they choice set so you don’t have to.

Methodological digression: Schwartz’s results point to an fascinating area of research for experimental economists. The establishment science fiction economics isn’t happy to recognize the scarcity of computational resources, and so just assumes that everybody is able to costlessly and immediately represent the entire choice set and come up with some preference-ordering over all those choices. Of course, we don’t do this. We represent a tiny fraction of the potential choice set, and the fraction that we do represent seems to be primed by context together with our belief systems (and other stuff). Somebody, please please tell us: HOW DOES THIS WORK?!

– If today was my birthday, how old would I be?

I’m going with K-Rad, Emilicious & the D.I.K., among others, to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center. Very exciting!

– My first, and I hope not last, Tech Central Station column is now up. It was inspired by my December post on the “hierarchy of public goods.”

– Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber drips with disgust at Congressman Billy Tauzin’s whoring:

For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack Valenti, more than $1 million a year. Apparently this wasn’t nearly enough for Tauzin, who held out for a substantially larger sum - and got it from PhRMA. As it happens, PhRMA is a particularly unpleasant organization - it played a dishonorable role in the AIDS drugs licensing for Africa controversy a few years ago, and has been up to its eyeballs in other controversies and backroom arrangements, up to and including the recent Medicare porkfest. Needless to say, Tauzin has been assiduous in his efforts to protect the interests of big pharma and the content industry over the last couple of years; it’s hard to believe that his grossly inflated salary is unconnected to services previously rendered. The phenomenon of Congressman-turned-lobbyist is hardly a new one; but the openness and extent of the greed on display is unusual, even for Washington.

I agree: sickening. I do hope Henry will accept this as pointing to a general lesson about the deep structural relationship between the motivations of political leaders and very large governments with vast regulatory powers. I’ve noticed that some people seem to think that if only the leaders or the regulations were different, then all would be well. Which is, I guess, a cute idea.

– Slate’s Jack Shafer gleefully rips the asshole out of the New America Foundation’s fundraising special in the New Atlantic.

– Gawker Media has launched a new blog devoted to gossip about the Federal City side of the District. Despite their innovative reputation, let it not go unsaid that in this instance Gawker is derivative. Swamp City has been covering the same beat for some time now, with panache. You should add it to your blogrolls forthwith, so that the Swamp City chick will stop pestering me.

– Joanne McNeill has the lowdown on paunchy aging hipster Gavin McGinnes. His claim to be conservative was apparently a spoof. This supports my argument below that claiming to be conservative is likely to be cooler than actually being conservative. McGinnes does a great job of showing how very uncool conservatives are by showing us just how eager they are to associate themselves with anybody, ANYBODY, with a jot of hpister cred.

– It’s not often these days that I say this, but I think Andrew Sullivan is spot on about the SOTU. If I didn’t agree entirely with Chris Sciabarra about the irrelevance of the presidency given the structural immutability of the American political system (great post, read it), then I too would be shopping for a Dem to back.

– Let’s play a game! Guess the identity of this somewhat supercilious (but unbearably precious) bullfighter! The winner receives a good rodgering.

– Despite the arguments set forth by Holiday Dmitri on NRO, conservatism is not now, and never was, cool. Indeed, anyone disposed to utter “young hipublican” without scare-quotes is immediately disqualified from the cool sweeps (unless of course the lack of scare quotes is itself part of an undetectably ironic performance of earnestness, which is cool.) As scientists at many of America’s most prestigious research institutions have long noted, cool is the most elusive and indefinable of properties. Nevertheless we do have some intuitive grasp of the logic of cool, which enables us to evaluate the arguments Dmitri adduces in support of her counter-intuitive claim.

Argument from the Existence of Cool Conservatives

(1) Gavin McGinnes is editor of Vice
(2) The editor of Vice is ipso facto cool.
(3) McGinnes describes himself as a conservative.
(4) The cool do not describe themselves as having uncool properties.
Thus, (5) Being a conservative is cool.

(2) is questionable (one might edit a magazine like Vice in order to create a perception of coolness in order to compensate for a deep lack), but let’s grant it.

(3) Is a problem if we interpret it as implying that being a conservative is cool just in virtue of the nature of conservatism, instead in virtue of the relationship between conservatism and other attributes, such as having an obscure record collection, or looking effortlessly fly. All we’re really getting here is that conservatism does not necessarily rule out being cool.

(3) has deeper problems still. It’s false. There is nothing less cool than visibly trying to be cool. Ascribing to oneself manifestly uncool properties, like being conservative, mitigates the perception that one is trying to be cool, and therefore enhances one’s coolness. So the cool are very likely to describe themselves as having uncool properties, such as being conservative. This fact leads to the necessity of distinguishing between those that say that they are conservative and those that are. To establish that it may be cool to say that one is conservative does not establish that it is cool to actually be conservative.

Now, I believe the author implies that she is cool, although she is cool enough not to explicitly admit to her self-estimate. And she appears earnest in her self-description as conservative. She has gone so far as to write an essay on how it is cool to be conservative in a widely-read publication, which is evidence of earnestness. So let’s take for granted that Dmitri believes in good faith that she is conservative. There are several possibilities here.

(A) She is mistaken in her belief and is not conservative, but is in fact cool.
(B) She is mistaken, but is not cool.
(C) She is not mistaken, and is cool.
(D) She is not mistaken, and is not cool.

On the basis of my slim knowledge of Ms. Dmitri, I will assume that she is cool, limiting myself to options (A) and (C).

To establish (A) we’d need to know what it is to be conservative. I believe there is much confusion here, and that conservative is a two-place, not one-place, predicate. One is conservative about ______, where the blank is to be filled in by some domain of life such as marriage, drugs, dress, constitutional interpretation, architecture, etc. If one is conservative about almost every domain, it may make sense to say that one is conservative simpliciter. But someone who is conservative in this unrestricted sense is necessarily not cool. If Ms. Dmitri thinks she is conservative in the unrestricted sense, then she is mistaken. But probably she does not believe that she is John Derbyshire, give or take a few secondary sexual characteristics. So (C) is most likely correct, given the restricted interpretation.

It is possible for someone like McGinnes to be both cool and conservative only if we interpret conservative in the restricted, domain-relative sense. One may be conservative about, say, the interpretation of rights, free-markets, and affirmative action programs, but decidely not about porn, music, and gender role.

But then we might suspect that McGinnes, or Dmitri, is not cool in virtue of of being conservative, but cool in virtue of NOT being conservative about the domains most relevant to being cool. But look. Then it’s possible that I am both cool (just imagine) and conservative on the restricted interpretation, despite the fact that I am pains to not describe myself as conservative.

The thesis that it is cool to be conservative is interesting only because it is counterintuitive given the unrestricted interpretation of conservative. But if the author of an article like Dmitri’s then deploys the restricted interpretation in order to successful identify some self-avowed conservatives who actually are cool, then the thesis becomes fairly trivial.

To get a taste of the triviality, notice that on the restricted interpretation it’s possible to have two people who are both conservative in this sense, but who agree about nothing whatsoever.

The Argument from college (little ‘c’) Republicans

(i) More college students identify themselves as Republicans than as Democrats
(ii) Large percentages of college students won’t do something unless there is a common perception that it is cool.
So, (iii) If a large percentage of college students identify as Republican, then there is a common perception that it is cool to be Republican.
(iv) There would be no such common perception unless it was true.
(v) Republicans are ipso facto conservative.
Therefore, (vi) It is cool to be conservative.

I think (iv) is just obviously false. The vast majority of college students have no or almost no cooldar, which is why so many try to be cool, yet fail so miserably, usually simply in virtue of trying. Just as one may infer the awfulness of the Dave Matthews Band on the basis of their popularity with college audiences, a consensus among college students that conservatism was cool, would constitute almost overwhelming evidence that it is not. The fact that students have had it up to here with the moralizing liberal self-love of the professoriate, establishes nothing whatsoever about the coolness of reaction.

(v) is also clearly false. Being Republican and being conservative are independent properties. And this is exactly what makes it possible to jump around in the category of Republicans in the service of an argument to the coolness of conservatism. A Venn diagram will refute this argument:

(a) Most Republicans are conservatives.
(b) Some Republicans are cool.
Thus, (c) some conservatives are cool.

The cool Republicans may well be those who are not conservative.

The Argument from College (big ‘c’) Republicans

“Since 1999, the College Republican National Committee has tripled its membership and now holds claim to 1,150 chapters, with more than 1,000 student coordinators on campuses nationwide.”

Same analysis as above. What this has to do with coolness is anybody’s guess. Julian suggests that Millenials are neo-fascist nationalists, which is not cool. Maybe that explains it.

The argument from the coolness of the The Criterion

(I)The editorial board of The Criterion are conservative.
(II) The board of The Criterion are “fashion-conscious provocateurs who inject dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude into the pages of their publication”
(III) It is cool to be a fashion-conscious provocateur, as is the expression of dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude.
So, (IV) The board of the Criterion is cool.
Thus, (V) There are cool conservatives.

This argument very clearly implies that dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude account for the cool of The Criterion. But these attributes are unconservative in their domains. As is being “fashion-conscious” for a man who is conservative about masculinity. The argument gets us no further than we were.

So, I think the best we can get out of Dmitri’s analysis is that it is possible to be both cool and conservative, assuming that we interpret conservative in a limited, and domain-specific way. But this makes the argument trivial. Saying that you are conservative is clearly not inconsistent with being cool, because saying that you are conservative is an excellent way of pretending to not be cool, which is cool-conducive. Also, more college students are becoming Republicans, for some reason.

The rhetorical thrust of Dmitri’s essay is that if you were worried about it, it’s OK to identify yourself as Republican or conservative, because it’s now cool. This idea (dare I say “meme”) seems to be getting around, and some people may even believe it. But it’s probably self-defeating. The reason cool is elusive is that it flees as soon as too many people think they can see it and be it. The question is whether Dmitri cares more about cool or conservatism. If it’s the latter, then she’ll be happy to use the rhetoric of cool to nudge a few rubes into pulling the lever for conservatives, even if it ensures that conservatism will not in fact be cool.

Anyway, gotta go: Star Trek’s on.

– Nice anaylysis by Tim Lee on how the tech innovations of the Dean campaign got ahead of Dean’s capacity as a candidate.

– Don’t miss this bizarre USA TODAY bar graph constructed from three of Superman’s bodily fluids.

– I enjoyed Mia Fineman’s perceptive but careful-not-to-make-too-firm-a-judgment essay on the paintings of John Currin on Slate. I find Currin excruciatingly boring, and technically just OK. Without the funky anatomical distortion (the creepy tiny extremities!), there’s just nothing to take in. But do look at the slideshow which features some other decent neo-realist painters. Vincent Desiderio’s Sleep (Slide #2) is just amazing, if only as a pointlessly showy and psychologically empty (I guess it is about unconsciousness) display of technique. Wade Schuman’s Conversation (#3) has rather more to be said for it, but still strikes me as glib, mannered and flat.

My problem with contemporary figurative painting in general is in the dreadful lack of psychological acuity among the leading painters. I will shout for joy from the mountaintops as soon I see a face that conveys anything like the fierce intelligence of Holbein’s Thomas More, the eerily intense placidity of Durer’s Durer, or the weary but habituated perceptiveness of Rembrandt’s aging Rembrandt. The condition of contemporary figurative painting is a bit like MFA workshop fiction: dazzlingly closely observed and spiritually hollow.

– Since my window for interest in Iowa-themed posts is now closing, let me just point out that Iowa comes out as the 47th most corrupt state in the union in this study. When I tell people Iowa was a good place to grow up, this sort of thing is part of what I mean. People with a conscience, unlike those shifty bastards up in North Dakota (#2)! But I guess my Saskatchewegian dad had to move to Nebraska (#50) to avoid the relatively malign nature of Iowa public life.

– Galen Strawson calls out the “narrativist orthodoxy” in his review of Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories. Strawson argues, and he is right, that we are not “constituted” by the stories of our lives in which we cast ourselves as characters. While having a sense that one’s life has gone well may involve seeing it as having had a satisfying narrative arc, the conditions for a satisfying arc are not something we are free to concoct from the abundant matter of imagination.

Bruner never raises the question of whether there is any sense in which one’s self-narrative should be accurate or realistic. Those who favour the extreme fictionalist or post-modernist version of the narrative self-creation view don’t care about this, both because they don’t care about truth and because a fiction isn’t open to criticism by comparison with reality (it doesn’t matter that there is no Middle Earth). But honesty and realism about self and past must matter. There are innumerable facts about one’s character and history that don’t depend on one’s inventions. One can’t found a good life on falsehood.

Strawson’s point should lead us to ask what makes a good story a good story. Presumably it has something to do with relating to the world, and to others, in the right sort of way. And the right way to relate is a fact about the world, independent of the stories we tell.

Reason editors with degrees in literature or film eager to praise consumer culture for providing the stuff of narrative self-invention, take note.

[Link via A&L Daily.]

– For some reason I just love the fact that they’re wearing the same socks.

[NOT WORK SAFE. Link via Fleshbot.]

Tim Graham of the NRO Corner get’s it right. Take note all you Mid-Atlantic ninnies.

UM…IT’S IOWA. [Tim Graham]
Dumbest moment of the morning came on NPR, when Juan Williams was asked if the around-zero cold would keep Iowans home from the caucuses. This is IOWA, people. They’re USED to these temps in the winter. Twenty below zero, that’s a factor. But they aren’t holding the caucuses outside…

A twenty below Iowans will begin to get firm with you about wearing a hat.

– As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: “The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You’ll Never Know who won Iowa.” (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, “The Vanishing.”)

The implication here is that there is something wrong with the caucus system, as if there is some one right, especially legitimate, way to choose delegates for a national party convention. There is no poll booth in a caucus, it’s just a bunch of people hanging out in a room. And your first preference doesn’t necessarily get registered (if your favorite candidate fails to cross a threshold, then you’ve got to wander over to some other more successful canidate’s posse to be counted). And there is no simple constant relationship between the number of people who stand for a candidate at caucus and the number of delegates you finally get.

This all seems to annoy Saletan and Schiller, who apparently think democracy essentially has something to do with adding up raw preferences in order to descry the ding an sich of the general will. They need to get over their journalist’s fetishism for polls, and stop thinking democracy is the same thing as an especially big Zogby survey.

We all should know by now that every voting scheme is arbitrary in its own way, and that there’s no general will to be expressed. Democracy, if it’s worth anything, is only secondarily about counting heads. First, it’s about procedures for social choice that diffuse power, that citizens will regard as legitimate, and which contribute to the stable, predictable functioning of the social order. People in Iowa LIKE the caucus, which is a prima facie good reason to also like the caucus. Iowans like getting together with people in their neighborhood, and talking over issues, and standing for their candidates. And there is a perfectly good procedure for deciding the winner of the caucus, and most everyone thinks that’s just fine, too. Delegates get selected. So it adequately serves the superficial democratic function. But the caucus is also a community experience that brings Iowans togethers, that provides them with a sense of choosing and governing together in a way much more intimate than the casting of anonymous ballots. And in this way, the caucus serves democracy’s deeper purposes very well.

Saletan and Schilller ridiculously compare what promises to be a very close caucus to the 2000 Florida presidential vote count:

Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at.

In Iowa, there will be no ballots.

This strikes me as dumb. Given the nature of the Florida debacle, shouldn’t it have occured to them that this is a virtue of the caucus?

– In response to my claim that men have not yet figured out how best to be men in the post-feminist world, Kim “Rifleman” DuToit writes:

Actually, we have figured it out, but I’m not so sure women are going to like the answer.

And if that’s too “old-fashioned” for the New Woman or Metrosexual Man, so much the better for the rest of us. They can have each other, and welcome.

Lovely. The problem here is not that Kim is being too “old-fashioned,” its that he’s being insufferably vicious.

If demanding equal respect for equal intelligence and competence, for equal ambition and accomplishment, is just too much, “too high maintenance,” for Kim, so much so that he is led to endorse the practice of seeking out “mail-order” brides who will acquiesce in subservience, then he has pretty much demonstrated the utter moral bankruptcy of his conception of masculinity. This strikes me as a confession of weakness at the deepest level. The argument that a woman with ambition, resolve, and a sense of independence is a woman who is trying to be “like a man” is of the same form, and elicits in decent people the same repugnance, as the argument that blacks who take their education seriously are trying to “be white”. It’s just sick. The “Western female societal construct” is an enormous triumph of civilization. Kim’s inability to admire women in this mold, and to appreciate the way such women have successfully preserved their femininity while moving outside of traditional feminine domains, shows us exactly why his notion of masculinity is something no self-respecting man or woman could accept. Additionally, if screaming “show us your tits” is really Kim’s idea of treating women “like a man,” then his notion of the respect men owe to other men is also incredibly troubling.

I think Kim thinks he’s being iconoclastic, or charmingly curmudgeonly, or something. This metrosexual thinks he should try being a man, because whatever that is, Kim ain’t it. Or he should stop trying, because if he is it, then it ain’t worth being.

– I’m proud to report that the Fly Bottle is #2 in this search on AOL, just after “A Special Weekend” by D. at Spinkle’s Golden Showers! [WARNING: For the love of sweet Jesus DO NOT READ "A Special Weekend" by D. at Sprinkle's Golden Showers!!! Just don't.]

[To National Review Readers: Sorry about this, didn't know you were coming. I repeat: DO NOT READ THE STORY. I mean it.]

This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide “$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain ‘healthy marriages.’”

This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy.

“We know this is a sensitive area,” Dr. Horn said. “We don’t want to come in with a heavy hand. All services will be voluntary. We want to help couples, especially low-income couples, manage conflict in healthy ways. We know how to teach problem-solving, negotiation and listening skills. This initiative will not force anyone to get or stay married. The last thing we’d want is to increase the rate of domestic violence against women.”

I’m sure the government will soon come around to the view that single people need listening skills too!

And it’s nice to be assured that the state will stay its healing hand and won’t force us into riveting 50 minute sessions down at the community center with besweatered, milquetoast PsyDs anxious to tell us how to live our lives.

Imagine:

“In order to increase your compassion for one another, you need first to have greater compassion for nature. Try not eating meat for a week, and see if you don’t find yourself more sensitive to your partner’s feelings!”

Or, worse:

“The first thing we’ve got to talk about is Jesus. Is Jesus in your life? There’s no reason NOT to beat your wife if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. I like to say that family that prays together stays together.”

Coming soon to a church basement near you.

[Link from Tyler Cowen @ the Volokhs.]

– Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore’s loathing of whiners, all he seems to manage is a mannered, whining lament for classical “thumotic” masculinity. One hopes for more from social critics. Moore’s essay is a perfect example of the kind of rote conservative judgment that I complained about yesterday in a post about the films of Whit Stillman. He just can’t seem to accept that there are new conventions, for better or worse, and so cannot bring himself to think critically and usefully of what it means to live a life within those conventions, rather than bleat impotently about the lost world.

Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism, which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations, and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood. What we need is a rethinking of what it is to be a man when women don’t need us economically, don’t require our paternalistic care, don’t conceive of themselves primarily as units for the production of babies, and thus look to relationships with men to meet human needs beyond economics, protection, and reproduction. We men haven’t quite figured this out yet, and so, yes, we are a bit adrift about how exactly to express our masculinity in today’s world. But it does no good to quote C.S. Lewis at us, and blame us for lacking sufficient martial virtue. Moore should make himself useful and think about what we men should be and do now given that our social role is irreversibly changed and women are never going back to the gilded cage.

[Cross-posted on Liberty & Power.]

– Julia Magnet’s thoughtful paean to the films of Whit Stillman moved me to dwell on tensions in my own character that reflect, I think, the uneasy integration of fairly traditional (read: conservative) values and the values of the “sexual revolution.” Magnet enthusiastically approves of Stillman’s rearguard defense of traditional conventions, and his indictment of the move to overthrow them in an attempt to, you know, liberate us from their strictures, to free us to strike out boldly on the journey of self-actualization. I too approve, sort of. But not at all enthusiastically. I am composed of too much of what they condemn.

Despite my own selective conservative streak, conservatives often make me uncomfortable, because they so often lack the sort of discerning judgment they laud. (This is, needless to say, not a lack exclusive to conservatives.) In her discussion of the characters of Metropolitan Magnet writes:

What really riles Charlotte is the fact that Alice still has standards, judges people, and rejects postmodern equivalency. “I’m sorry,” Alice unhesitatingly pronounces, “but I don’t consider the guy who did the Spider-Man comics to be a serious author.” In Stillman’s eyes, what makes Alice so attractive is just this refined capacity for judgment.

Perhaps refinement is required to omit Stan Lee from the Canon. But this sort of judgment is very often rote, reflexive and unrefined, not unlike Magnet’s casual use of ‘postmodern’ as an epithet. I’ve met enough St. John’s and Hillsdale grads, quasi-Straussian pseudo-intellectuals, and martini quaffing, cigar puffing, Burke quoting suspenders-wearers, to see that, these days, endorsement of a conservative weltanschaung may be no more than a particularly luxurious form of transgression, and that the stoutly anti-postmodern judgments that Stillman and Magnet so admire may be simply what one says.

It’s true, conventions allow us to coordinate and constrain our behavior so that we are able to pursue our various ends without coming to grief. But it’s also true that conventions retard, stultify, and oppress. The trick is judging which conventions do which, or if they do the latter, whether there is a compensating benefit. Such refined judgment is surpassingly attractive because it is surpassingly difficult. However, I worry that it is in the nature of conservatism to be indolent in judgment about the cultural patrimony. Some, perhaps many, of our conventions are worth defending, and so conservatives will often be right to defend them — but right by default, and not by any discernment about the particular case. Yet some of our institutions are “peculiar,” as they say, and demand our unreserved opposition. The Grimke sisters’, for example, were not wasted lives.

Discussing Stillman’s lament over lost mores in The Last Days of Disco, Magnet write,

The adherents of the sexual revolution presented a world without consequences. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we would satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. This proved to be a lie: sex has profound consequences–emotional, moral, and physical–as Stillman dramatizes in the final twist he gives to Alice’s story. Her one encounter scars Alice for life–Tom gives her herpes. Though Tom imagines himself a critic of the sexual revolution, in this instance he embodies its wounding irresponsibility: he knew he had a venereal disease but took no precautions, assuming that Alice?s promiscuity excused his carelessness.

This is a powerful, perceptive scene. But Magnet betrays a lack of refinement in her insistence on overstating its lesson. Convention as such was never abandoned. Traditional conventions were effaced and transformed to create new ones. That sex has profound emotional, moral, and physical consequences was never in dispute. The question is whether it’s marriage or nothing. Few believe that wanton promiscuity adds to “the store of human happiness.” But it’s not clear that the loosening of sexual constraint has not. The emotional, moral, and physical consequences of sex on my life, and the life of most of my unmarried friends, men and women, has been far from disaster. I don’t doubt that the transition to new conventions created human wreckage. I don’t doubt that herpes got around. But I do doubt that we would be better off overall with the old constraints.

Some of which, by the way, are with us still, and which, by the way, are cruel, demeaning, and immoral. Ask a couple of loving men or women who would like to be afforded the benefits and protections of a legal marriage. A conservative who has developed even a weak capacity for moral discernment and social judgment should see through to the logic of the institution and endorse gay marriage. But instead we get vehement, unrefined declamation of prejudice, which is not, I believe, the same thing as having standards.

The point is that we should all be conservatives insofar as there are conventions and standards worth conserving. (There are.) And we should be hesitant to throw off norms we find inconvenient, because they may serve larger purposes we don’t understand. But some of our conventions are perverse and wrong. So we’ve got to have standards that allow us to pass judgment on them, and we have to be willing to change the conventions and norms if need be. The choice isn’t between the conventions history happened to pass down to us and the relativist abolition of all standards. The choice is between the intelligent application of social judgment and apology for injustice.

So let us all abhor the cheap confession of low feeling, admire the stoic virtues, preserve the conditions for love and family, praise the ennobling and beautiful, love our freedom, hold one another responsible, and treat each other with respect, courtesy, and due deference. And then… screw like the end is nigh.

– Well, very suddenly, I am teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, not far from my digs. I’m scrambling to prepare.

In addition, I’m guest blogging over at Liberty & Power. And I’m still blogging at Radley’s until, I guess, he tells me I’m not.