This essay by Kenan Malik is so damn right it almost hurts. Choice bits:

Modern multiculturalism seeks self-consciously to yoke people to their identity for their own good, the good of that culture and the good of society. A clear example is the attempt by the Quebecois authorities to protect French culture. The Quebec government has passed laws which forbid French speakers and immigrants to send their children to English-language schools; compel businesses with more than fifty employees to be run in French; and ban English commercial signs. So, if your ancestors were French you, too, must by government fiat speak French whatever your personal wishes may be. Charles Taylor regards this as acceptable because the flourishing and survival of French culture is a good. ‘It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it’, he argues. Quebec is ‘making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language.’ Its policies ‘actively seek to create members of the community… assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers.’

An identity has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it’s a private club you must join. Being black or gay, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, requires one to follow certain ‘life-scripts’ because ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires.’ There will be ‘proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are made; expectations to be met; battle lines to be drawn.’ It is at this point, Appiah suggests, that ‘someone who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we have replaced one kind of tyranny with another.’ An identity is supposed to be an expression of an individual’s authentic self. But it can too often seem like the denial of individual agency in the name of cultural authenticity.

[...]

A century ago intellectuals worried about the degeneration of the race. Today we fear cultural decay. Is the notion of cultural decay any more coherent than that of racial degeneration? Cultures certainly change and develop. But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Will Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’… So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

[...]

The logic of the preservationist argument is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. Like racial scientists with their idea of racial type, some modern multiculturalists appear to hold a belief in cultural type.

So the multicultural left and the racist right converge. If you get your head straight, you see what matters are certain values and institutions, and those are not trapped in particular essentialized cultures like flies in amber. If these values and institutions are really worthwhile, if they create conditions that are really appealing to human beings in a deep, more-than-accidental way, then it is possible to defend and preserve them as the cultures in which they originated inevitably recombine with others and evolve.

Alan Wolfe’s prolix review essay of Bruno Frey and Dan Ariely’s recent books had a few nice insights, but my overwhelming judgment was that he simply doesn’t know enough about the subject to write a competent review. Dan Drezner picks up on a couple of Wolfe’s forehead-slappers. In a nuthsell, Wolfe thinks Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are “marginal and somewhat bizarre thinkers,” which betrays either stunning ignorance or an appalling lack of judgment. And he seems to think Steve Levitt is a behavioral economist, when in fact Levitt is an old-school Chicago rat choice guy good at fancy statistics who is very skeptical of behavioral economics. Dan’s got it right when he says “Whoever assigns and edits Alan Wolfe at The New Republic should really be taken out to the back of the woodshed today.”

I haven’t read Frey’s book yet, but, setting aside my more critical approach to the data, I expect to like it a great deal. Frey is one of the only social scientists working in the happiness field who fully grasps the great 20th century developments in constitutional political economy and institutional economics. Most of his papers have an agreeable institutionalist view that is keenly aware of the fallacy of thinking about a politics of happiness as a politics of centralized scientific administration. Indeed, decentralization is a theme of Frey’s work, and I’m looking forward to his book.

On the other hand, I found Dan Ariely’s book to be a jocular disaster. Here’s what I said about it on Free Exchange way back in February. I’m glad to see Herb Gintis, one of my favorite thinkers in psychologically-informed economics, had a similar reaction:

Ariely is a creative experimenter with zero capacity to deal with economic theory. By accepting the behavioral paradigm (”people are not logical, they are psychological”), he makes it in principle impossible to explain his experimental results.

What does it tell you when the big-ideas review essays in prestige publications are completely blown away by free Amazon reviews? I wonder what Wolfe’s per-word rate was? Gintis does a hell of a lot better for free. Sooner or later everyone in the know will realize they’re supposed to be paying attention to Herb Gintis’ Amazon reviews (among other things), and that the back of TNR just doesn’t matter all that much.

[Thanks to James Chalmers for the pointer.]

Arnold Kling reminds me of this Woodrow Wilson stunner:

I am not repeating the famous sentence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, “to the end that this may be a government of laws and not of men.” There never was such a government. Constitute them how you will, governments are always governments of men, and no part of any government is better than the men to whom that part is entrusted. The gauge of excellence is not the law under which officers act, but the conscience and intelligence with which they apply it, if they apply it at all.

I’ve always been fascinated by this passage because it is both obviously true and obviously false. How it can be both at once?

Wilson is right that laws are not magic spells that bind the rulers to enforce them. The effective law is the law applied by the ruling class. He’s right about that. But not so fast. A well-designed constitution knows this and sets competing ruling elites jealous of their turf against each other. The will of some officers of the law can get us a long way in checking the will of others. It’s amazing how power-seeking opportunists can become sticklers for the letter of the law. Of course, if they all manage to collude, we’re pretty close to Wilson’s world, but perhaps not entirely in it. For what determines the attitude of the ruling class to the laws? In a constitutional moral culture, like America’s, the Constitution is widely believed to have a bit something more than merely conventional moral authority. Some of the ruling class, including many of the judges in the court of final appeal, will share this belief, and if they don’t they’ll have to be pretty coy about it in order to avoid political backlash from the constitution-loving people and their very learned and motivated constitutional lawyers. Under those conditions, the laws will tend to guide action, if only loosely. In that case, the content of the laws surely to a large extent determines the excellence of government.

So, sure. Constitutions are rarely constraints on political behavior in the absences of a political culture that buys into the legitimacy of the constitution. But some constitutions, if faithfully applied for enough time, can help create social conditions that lead the people living under the constitution to internalize and affirm its values and principles. When folks like Wilson complain about our antediluvian constitution, they’re really complaining about the moral culture that the constitution itself helped to create.

I think if you put it all more plainly, Wilson’s point is obviously crazy. Laws change all the time and things get better or worse because the laws do tend to get more or less faithfully enforced and so what the law says matters. If the ruling powers didn’t need to actually change the law to get things done, but merely needed to do their thing with “conscience and intelligence,” then the ruling elite would worry less about changing the laws than they actually do.

Why reply to McArdle, Douthat, and Poulos’ replies to my post about Kerry’s demography article when Kerry does it better than I could have? I think she’s exactly right that cultural change occurs on many margins at once and that individuals are not Zombie-like hosts of static, monolithic culture. And I especially like the conclusion:

Part of the reason we find it so difficult to think about demographic change is that we fail to notice the goalposts changing around us. It’s true that the people we call social conservatives in this country are reproducing faster than the people we call socials liberals. But what will it mean to be “conservative” in America a century from now? In 1908 being a social conservative meant something far less amenable to tolerance than “legal marriage is for straight people!” Yes, Utah’s birthrate is higher than that of Bangladesh. I don’t know how to worry about that particular factoid, because I have no idea what it will mean to be a socially conservative Mormon in 30 years. It certainly means something different today than it did 30 years back.

People constantly make the simple error of thinking categories of identity have stable content just because the labels don’t change. But you can have literally no one “converting” from one creed to another and still find the culture and world utterly changed. Indeed, the sect of Mormonism I grew up in, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is now deeply different than it was when I was baptized into it at the age of eight. Not only does it now have women in the priesthood and a non-Joseph Smith-descended Prophet-President, but it doesn’t even have the same name! If I had children I couldn’t raise them in the religion of my youth, because it doesn’t exist any more. Conservatives of all religions in the liberal world constantly complain about this. Though there is institutional continuity, neither ritual form not doctrinal content stay the same — not even in relatively conservative religious traditions.

Part of my whiggish conviction is the thought that, in these latter days, the transmission of culture from one generation to the next is increasingly low fidelity, because the culture parents grew up in does not last long enough to pass to their kids. There is fairly rapid cultural selection going on, and it has been very friendly to broad liberalization and very unfriendly to conservative norms. That’s why some religious folk think they have to raise their kids on isolated compounds. I had not-that-distant ancestors who spoke Norwegian, German, Lakota, et al, but I don’t really even know who they were, much less what they stood for. Maybe some natalist can convince the Taliban there is really no problem if they can just keep their birthrates up. But certain radical fundamentalist Muslims think they need to destroy liberal capitalist modernity for a very good reason. Unless they do, it really will destroy their creed and its culture.

“Customer” by Raheem DeVaughn may be the greatest song ever written as it is the first to fully grasp, and to deploy for the purposes of seduction, the immense romance of being catered to … like a customer (at an idealized, perfected, phantasmagorical Burger King, one is lead to imagine). The luxury of the commercial relationship lies in the simplicity of its mode of reciprocity. “You can have it your way; you’re the customer,” DeVaughn croons. Which is to say, commercial exchange allows for customization and undivided satiation, as it requires but a simple payment and not constant emotional negotiation and renegotiation to arrive at an only partially satisfying compromise. To be treated like a “customer” is to be treated precisely the way you want, not the way someone else wants to treat you. Though the “payment” implied in the song is nothing more or less than acquiescence to DeVaughns’ attentive, indulgent , and no doubt skillful ministrations, “Customer” works astonishingly well as an anthem for the legalization of sexual services.

From a Banksy show.

Saw this at the Hirshhorn today. Awesome…

I can’t say I really care all that much about the explanation. I just found it completely transfixing in the gallery.

Yes, I know the political history of the Bauhaus and the International School, thank you very much. (That major in the history and philosophy of art is not worth nothing!) And I admit it does put a strain on my not-very-well-thought-out analogy, if that’s the modernism you had in mind. Of course, I had in mind houses that actually are very lovely and quite nice to live in. How about Frank Lloyd Wright (everybody loves him, right?) or Richard Neutra?

Perhaps the difference in mentality I had in mind is better captured by the difference between the person who is able to grasp why Mark Rothko, say, is a much greater painter than Bouguereau. If you don’t get it, well, then that just proves my point, doesn’t it?

Anyway, semi-silly aesthetic analogies aside, the point is that people’s natural tastes for social structure runs toward the tribal and teleological, but this isn’t actually that good for people. Market liberalism, which is too abstract or “thin” to seem really satisfying or meaningful, since there is no single common goal that transcends the goals individuals happen to have, actually leaves people better off than all the alternatives, and measurably so. It’s not hard to understand why people are so attracted to National Greatness, or to Bouguereau. But with a little inspection of the evidence, or a little development of taste, one can see why this is a mistake… is what I was getting at.

It’s not just that you should be ashamed of your vulgarity if you thrill to the idea of America uber alles, though of course you should, but rather that you should be ashamed of preferring a morally worse state affairs over a better one. People who thunder on about virtue like to complain about the immaturity and self-indulgence of individuals in commercial societies, but those people are very often the ones seeking to indulge atavistic social instincts that our moral culture has begun to mature past.

I don’t have a beef against virtue. Far from it; I’m a big fan of the attempt to study character strengths scientifically. But virtues, if they are worth caring about, are instrumental to well-being and relative to social and economic structure. McCain’s brand of military virtue isn’t admirable in a politician. It’s dangerous. And it does not seem to me that McCain has any worthwhile virtues that, say, Mitt Romney lacks. Indeed, I suspect that my man Mitt has modern managerial and leadership virtues that all the other candidates lack. If Romney is the candidate of virtue, it’s because he’s a first-rate capitalist, not an abstemious Mormon family man. And, as far as I can tell, Barack Obama has a much more inspiring capacity for leadership than does McCain, if that’s the sort of thing you like. The only reason a virtue-thumper would be touting McCain in particular is an infatuation with the virtues of war.

People who never encounter them.

Kerry reports at Reason that state and local tough-on-immigration laws come primarily from places next to no one immigrates to.

In a report to be published by the American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) in September, [San Diego State sociologist Jill] Esbenshade finds that almost 80 percent of the localities where ordinances have been discussed had below the national average of Latino population share in 2000.

I found this contrast especially illuminating:

Meanwhile, Missouri’s newly deputized immigration enforcers have claimed the right to detain even immigrants who would not otherwise be arrested. As Gov. Blunt fills the state’s detention centers, he might ponder the last time the state experienced an “unnatural influx” of migrants. In the first half of the 20^th century, another politically unpopular group—Southern blacks—flooded into Missouri, bringing culture and identity, barbeque and blues. School kids learn to call that the “Great Migration”; politicians refer to today’s “immigration crisis.”

Yesterday’s cultural synthesis is today’s cultural amnesia, I guess. Which reminds me that I keep forgetting to visit Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum.

What are happiness and well-being? No need to make it complicated. Dan Haybron is correct:

The short answer, according to me

Happiness is best understood as consisting in a person’s overall emotional condition. This includes moods, many emotions, and a person’s mood propensity, or tendency to experience various moods (which varies considerably over time). To be happy is roughly for one’s emotional condition to be solidly positive, with a heavy predominance of positive over negative affect.

Well-being consists in nature-fulfillment, making my view eudaimonistic. The account will likely take this form: well-being consists mainly in the fulfillment of the self’s emotional and rational aspects—i.e., in being authentically happy, and in success regarding the commitments that shape one’s identity. But our subpersonal natures probably also count, so we might add, secondarily, the fulfillment of our “nutritive” and “animal” natures: health or vitality and pleasure.

Almost correct. So, I take it back. Plenty of need to make it complicated. Starting about ten minutes ago, I no longer understand what “nature-fulfillment” is. I have no idea what my self’s “emotional and rational aspects” are. I have emotional capacities and cognitive capacities of various sorts—powers Hobbes might say. But I can’t exercise all of them. I am budget-constrained in the exercise of my capacities. Which ones to exercise, then? Which one’s to develop, perfect? Which to ignore, let wither? (How do I even individuate them—know where one ends and another begins?) If I’m supposed to exercise just the ones that add up to “well-being,” then we’ve circularly defined well-being, and haven’t said anything about it.

Further, I claim, our basic, culturally untutored cognitive capacities don’t add up to some kind of natural “rationality” in either an Aristotelian or Kantian (or whatever) sense. Rationality is an art. So our normative conception of rationality (and probably our conception of various forms of emotion) just is a kind identity-shaping commitment that doesn’t exist prior to or independent of set of social conventions and a personal commitment to hew to them. If I shape my identity by commitment to the exercise of certain emotional or rational capacities, then it may be necessary to sacrifice the exercise of some other emotional capacities—for example, the ones that reinforce a “solidly positive emotional condition,” or happiness. Can happiness be anathema to some people’s well-being?

Back to this nature-fulfillment business. Many folks seem to believe in “callings,” or nature-fulfilling activities. Maybe your calling is to make beautiful music on the piano. But it’s not like there are pianos in the wild, sprouting from the ground under the baobab trees. In a possible world without pianos, where would you be? Is the piano just a specification of a general to-be-fulfilled nature, a general naturally defined set of begging-to-be-realized potentials just hanging around in some kind of waiting room of the “self” (or subpersonal animal)? It seems doubtful. It seems more likely that the piano is an opportunity for a previously undreamt identity-shaping—capacity-shaping—commitment. There is no kind of personal nature that mastering the piano fulfills without pianos.

It is tempting for me to see this conclusion as a fat shiny nail craving the tender attentions of my hammer and to argue (Bang!) here is an argument for the proliferating plenitude and specialization of market society. The more piano-like opportunities to uniquely shape a custom soul, the better. But, the thought is, there may be no relevant fixed “nature,” and so there may be little normative  oomph in the possibility of committing to and fulfilling a particular constructed nature, unless there is something especially fitting about that nature relative to the infinite alternatives. But in that case we still need something fixed, like natures, just more individualized and specific.

Maybe we do have them, not because we come with them built in, but because they get built in through the interaction of our natural material–basic capacities, powers, etc.—with the culture we find ourselves embedded in. The more various and abundant the culture, the more fine-grained our micro-natures. So well-being as nature-fulfillment in market societies requires the maintenance of markets that churn out a dizzying variety of undreamt identity-shaping ”pianos” that we can commit to in order to realize our seemingly factory-installed but hyper-individualized “potentials.”

So, Bang!, anyway.

I really enjoyed this Seed article on neurogenesis. Much of this points the way to the kind of thing a scientifically credible study of happiness would involve (i.e., not extrapolations from silly surveyrs, but things like the way stress impedes neural regeneration). Of course, even a bit of significant plasticity raises interesting social questions. Or, as the author of the article puts it:

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance.

This seems to me to be a paragraph that isn’t thought through. First, the social implications we’re interested in are human social implications, not marmoset social implications. But primates all, yes. Now, the fact that there is a dominance hierarchy at all says that the playing field isn’t level. The fact that the brains of the alpha and omega are different isn’t a side-effect of their positions in the hierarchy. It’s part of what the hierarchy is. And then poverty comes out of absolutely nowhere at this point of the article. Who thought poverty was an idea? And we’ve known stress is a physical condition for a long time. What’s going on!?

We get some explanation later on:

Subsequent experiments have teased out a host of other ways stress can damage the developing brain. For example, if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions—like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day—her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety. Being low in a dominance hierarchy also suppresses neurogenesis. So does living in a bare environment. As a general rule of thumb, a rough life—especially a rough start to life—strongly correlates with lower levels of fresh cells.

Gould’s research inevitably conjures up comparisons to societal problems. And while Gould, like all rigorous bench scientists, prefers to focus on the strictly scientific aspects of her data—she is wary of having it twisted for political purposes—she is also acutely aware of the potential implications of her research.

“Poverty is stress,” she says, with more than a little passion in her voice. “One thing that always strikes me is that when you ask Americans why the poor are poor, they always say it’s because they don’t work hard enough, or don’t want to do better. They act like poverty is a character issue.”

Gould’s work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the brain.

So, ah! Here’s the politics. And here’s where the brilliant Gould gets pretty confused. Why think character issues have nothing to do with, say, neurogenesis? Aristotle says virtue is a hexis, a habit, a settled disposition of the soul to feel and act. Losing neurons, or failing to repair neurons, that are implicated in hedonic tone and motivation surely has something to with habit, virtue, character. No?

Here’s a conjecture. I think the “potentional implications” here are mostly socially conservative. It’s true that not having enough can be stressful. But most Americans in “poverty” have enough. So here’s where folks on the left want to shift the question to the dominance hierarchy. (That’s ostensibly what that Cassidy article was about.) Low status: now that’s stressful. The question mark after “steal underpants” and before “profit” here is some mysterious mapping of a primate dominance hierarchy on to a local or even national income scale. But what matters primate-wise is the very local band or troop. The low status rhesus isn’t stressed out by the high status rhesus the next forest over. He’s tyrranized by his second cousin. So, if we’re talking about the stressors of poverty, we have to ask, What accounts for high and low status in low income communities? If the answer is not something the aspiration to which is likely to precipitate a climb from poverty (i.e., hard work, team spirit, punctuality), then think about that. I’m not going to go all Bill Cosby on you, but I think you can see where this can go. Note also that in many poor neighborhoods and communities, the family, if there is a family, is more or less chaotic—lacking order, clear moral expectations, and the background assurance of responsible loving care. That’s surely stressful. But it is not the poverty per se that is doing it. It is the culture. Amish folk living peacefully under the poverty line are not losing neurons in droves to the stress of their modest economic status. And I bet some of the kids out there soaked in glucocorticoids have pretty nice cell phones.

I look forward with eager anticipation to the social neuroscience of the very near future, when Odling-Smee niche construction theory and Boyd-Richerson cultural evolution theory meet neurogenesis. In human environments, status is culturally shaped, and so status-related stress and neural damage are too culturally shaped. If we find out that status competition in some cultures leads to large overall gains, and pretty small negative effects, while status competition in other cultures leads to stress-induced brain warp, then . . . well, we’ll really know something, won’t we?

Did you know John Malkovich designs and sells clothes? And did you know that I would very eagerly buy these clothes if I was paid like a movie star?

Grant McCracken conjectures that the sudden 1990’s decrease in violent crime is due to . . . abortion?

No.

Chuck D! The effect of the mainstreaming of rap on the “esteem economy,” that is.

If Grant is correct, Flava Flav deserves beatification

Has anyone been reading The Believer? Is it worth it?

And has anyone read Rick Moody’s review there of Wieseltier’s review of Baker? What does it say?!

Checkpoint, by Nicholson Baker, New York: Knopf, 115 pages, $15.95

The resounding Republican victory left legions of Bush-haters in manic disbelief, with trembling fistfuls of perfectly good hair. The voters, naturally, have come under fire. There is talk of exodus to Canada. Under such conditions one can easily imagine some would-be Blue State Czolgosz thumbing through Nicholson Baker’s new novella, Checkpoint, nodding, dreaming filthy dreams of execucide.

Bush’s reëlection may drive Nicholson Baker to put his head through a wall, but it’s the best thing that could happen to his sales. Checkpoint has sold poorly so far because it’s a mediocre book. Nevertheless, Baker is one of the best writers of his generation, celebrated for his crystalline exaltations of the mundane and his pioneering exploration of neglected masturbatory possibilities. Although it is, by Baker’s usual standards, a middling production, Checkpoint did occasion something of a second-order news event as critics and commentators from across the notional left-right spectrum rose to condemn it for immorality, bad taste, or both. Checkpoint is centrally occupied with volcanic outrage over the Iraq war and the crazed desire to murder George W. Bush, and therefore makes up in controversy what it lacks in quality.

Checkpoint poses as the transcript of a taped conversation between an unhinged left-wing conspiracy theorist named Jay and his old friend, Ben, an amateur photographer and commonplace, pusillanimous, middle-aged subscriber to (one imagines) The Utne Reader. Jay has called Ben to his room in a hotel near the White House where they commiserate about the evil of Bush and his advisors (”these rusted hulks, these zombies”), the raw, outrageous injustice of the war in Iraq, and Jay’s plan to murder the president with wacky imaginary weapons (flying saw blades; uranium boulder; homing bullets “marinated” in a box with a picture of president; specially brainwashed scorpion for Cheney; a hammer).

Ben, it turns out, largely agrees with Jay on the facts, and he assents to the preliminary moral verdict: Bush is corrupt; his administration is criminal; he is tantamount to a murderer. But Ben dissents on the ultimate verdict: justice does not demand that Bush be translated from high office to a yet higher sphere. The difference between the two men, as trifling as they seem in ideological terms, is the subject of the book. How, Baker asks, may we remain sane in a world of intolerable cruelty, injustice, and corruption? Kill the president? No.

The answer, and it is a good answer: get a camera.

Baker’s critics perhaps felt free to flout the usual standards of criticism and indulge in daft moralizing because Checkpoint itself seems to be a daftly moralistic book. Tim Noah called it “a work of pornography.” In a huffy, matronly review, Leon Wieseltier called it a “scummy little book.” Rush Limbaugh said . . . well, he didn’t like it. But it is less daftly moralistic than it first appears, as it is in many ways an indictment of the deforming effects of the hyper-heightened moral sensibility it seems to exemplify.

Checkpoint makes plain that Jay, Baker’s Bush-loathing nutcase, is in fact a nutcase. One cannot be like Jay without fraying the delicate threads in the weave of a decent life. Jay himself recognizes that he has paid a dear price for his compulsive over-politicization. Speaking of his ex-wife, he says:

I just wore Lila out. You know? With me, everything’s political. I mean, she’s political too, but not as much . . . I’ve made a bollix of my life, that’s for sure.

Jay cannot find the safety on his hair-trigger sense of injustice, and so cannot fail to wreak collateral damage on his loved ones, leaving him perpetually outraged and alone. Not a ringing endorsement.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the raving Jay does often speak for Baker, who has admitted to obsession over the war. As David Gates wrote in Newsweek:

“Checkpoint” did, in fact, originate in Baker’s own fury, grief and helplessness over Iraq. “I was plodding
along, writing my little books,” he says, “and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over.” He lost a month of 2003 to his obsession with the news, swore off Google News and blogs–he now has a Post-It on his screen saying ONLY E-MAIL and finally wrote the first draft of “Checkpoint” in April 2004, during the siege of Fallujah, because he could think about nothing else. As he typed, he found himself weeping.

If one is familiar with Baker’s autobiographical writings, one can detect a lot of Baker in Jay.(Compare to the above: “Jay: I’d been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google News twenty times a day.”) All the same, he is embarrassed by Jay, which should be no surprise. It is Baker’s peculiar form of generosity to share with us his awkward relation to himself, as he does in Vox and The Fermata, where he frankly shares, not wholly unashamed, his uncomfortably weird sexual imagination, or in U and I, where he explores in clinical detail his ridiculously vain obsession with John Updike.

Here, in Checkpoint, Baker lay bare his moral obsessiveness and political crankery for our discomfiting inspection. He does his best, through Ben, to talk himself down, to convince himself that justice–politics–does not exhaust goodness. Baker appears to be trying to convince himself (or some shade of himself) that the life of aesthetic engagement, the life of the novelist, is not an irresponsible, trivializing evasion of the supreme moral imperative. Or, rather less grandly, that irresponsible, trivializing evasion through art is less bad than killing the President.

Much of Checkpoint bounces back and forth between talk of murder and photography. Ben relates to Jay his new interest in expensive, large format camera equipment, and suggests it as an alternative to homicidal obsession.

Jay:     . . . I’m going to kill the fucker!
Ben:    No you’re not.
Jay:     Penisfucker!
Ben:    Jay, relax.
Jay:     Why should I relax? Jiminy Cricket. Anyway, so
you bought a camera, did you. How diverting. . . .

Later:

Ben:     But my suggestion is, get yourself
a camera. . . .

Jay:     I thought film was dead.
Ben:    It’s dying, but it’s not dead. The larger formats
still hold more
detail. Look, my friend, look. Okay, they used napalm. That’s very
bad. 
    I agree. Shooting the head of state is not a
solution.

Jay is not easily placated, having developed a moral sensitivity to general suffering that would make Peter Singer proud. It is indeed hard to resist Jay’s outrage when he describes the horrific episode from which Checkpoint takes its title. A family in a Land Rover comes to an Army checkpoint, attempting to flee the war zone. Somebody in the car waves, and the soldiers think the wave indicates something it does not and opens fire
on the family.

Jay:     . . . and so there was this huge blast of fire, and one of the women in the car, the mother, she said, “I saw the–” Sorry.
Ben:     It’s okay.
Jay:     She said, “I saw the heads–” Pull myself together.
Ben:     It’s all right.
Jay:     She said, “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off.” That’s what she fucking said. I’m not kidding you, man. “My two little girls.” That’s what she fucking said. Can you imagine it? You’re just trying to get your family out of a war zone? Your farm’s already been blasted by helicopters, and then a bunch of guys in Kevlar open fire on your kids, and you see that happen? Ho, God.
Ben:     That’s bad.
Jay:     Liberators. Such bullshit. It’s just one event. The grandfather was killed, too. You know what he had on? He was wearing a pin-striped suit so he would look more American. Ho, man. Ho, man. And that creep, that fucking Texas punk, who can’t even talk, with his drugged-out eyes, he brought us to this point, to this war, and for nothing, for not one red fucking thing.

Obviously Jay’s admirable sympathy is not idle fellow feeling. It works a path through Jay’s implicit theory of just war and just retribution. But he fails to recognize a difference in rational status between the fact of his feeling and the assertion of his judgment. He does not question that that one might not really follow from the other. Jay takes his conclusion to follow from a kind of inexorable machinery of moral-psychological inference.

Jay:     So then the desire for justice starts moving through me. It’s like a huge paddlewheel. It churns up all this foam and fury. VENGEANCE.

It is perhaps Ben’s failure to question the transition to “VENGEANCE” that led Tim Noah to complain, strangely, that the conversation between Jay and Ben “isn’t a debate at all,” as if it should be. Ben doesn’t disagree with Jay’s moral logic. Rather, he exhorts Jay to stop fixating on the sorts of thing that set in motion the paddlewheel of justice.

Ben suggests, unhelpfully, copying a book word for word. Mainly, he sticks to the remedy of aesthetic engagement. He notes, for instance, that the Dutch masters were surrounded by cockroaches.

Ben:     . . . The painters were doing the things they could do, never mind the pests–the pests were bracketed off. They didn’t impinge. The painters looked at the trees. That’s what you should do.

Looking at the trees in the right sort of way calls up a different kind of emotional logic. Ben walks Jay through the experience of looking at the world through a viewfinder:

Ben:     . . . You might see, oh, I don’t know, a nuthatch on a fence. You think, take the picture? No, no. There’s somebody’s cat sniffing a blade of grass. Take the picture? No, no. You move on. A twisted piece of wire on the ground. Yes? No, no. You see what’s happening?
Jay:     I’m not sure I do.
Ben:     What’s happening is that the weight of the camera in your hand–and remember, it’s a heavy camera–the holding of it is changing the way you look at everything. You look up at the buildings, the stonework up there–ah, and then you see the trees . . .

Ben goes on to describe the sublimity of photographing a catalpa tree and its “incredible explosion of black twigs reaching in every direction.”

Ben:     . . . I knew I had that catalpa in the bag. I knew its secrets. Yet there it was still out in the street for everyone to enjoy. So who cares about George W.? He’s irrelevant. He’s irrelevant. You see?

Jay finally relents, settling for an attack with a hammer on a photograph of Bush, an act of minor aggression that may have a similar tonic effect on millions of disaffected Kerry voters.

So Ben’s strategy is a success with Jay. Baker’s novella, however, leaves the reader with an aftertaste of failure. Checkpoint sputters to an end (they smash the picture, press “Stop” on the tape recorder, and, we imagine, just leave) because one senses that Baker has not really satisfied himself that it’s okay to become one with catalpa trees, or to rhapsodize about the geometry of milk cartons, as he does to wonderful effect in The Mezzanine, while our government blows innocent kids to bloody pieces in an unjust war. We can, like the Dutch Masters ignoring the cockroaches, just “bracket” it all off. But once one has tasted sublime moral outrage, this has to seem like woeful retreat.

Baker is, as always, embarrassed about his obsessiveness. He realizes that it is insane to ask that we go forward deranged by our moral horror until the last knot of injustice is undone. And so he saves Jay from his insanity. Yet he is embarrassed, too, by the aesthetic remedy, by the fact that it’s the best he can manage.

But it is the best he can manage, especially given the corner he has painted himself into with the completeness of Jay and Ben’s agreement. However, Baker may be showing us something worth seeing. It is, perhaps, our minimal moral obligation to be at least slightly abashed by our evasion of total moral engagement, although we really must avoid it. Morals, and politics especially, do not reign supreme over life. We may, if we choose, cultivate the beautiful, or devote ourselves to the pleasures of discovery. But we may not do so blithely. Life is a web of awful tradeoffs; there is no escape from regret, or shame.

The lesson, then, for those millions with a visceral antipathy to Bush, and a horror of another four Bush years, is just to set politics aside, to look away, to look to the trees–every once in a while at least, for balance–and accept that even if this is a shameful way to live, it is the best way to live.

Checkpoint is not a great book, but it’s not bad advice.

Tons of great stuff over at Julian’s today. In this post, he seems to be asking in part (he says a lot more) whether one can be a culture warrior and a good Rawlsian political liberal at the same time. If that’s the question, then I think the answer is: yeah, sort of.

The point of public reason is not that one cannot attempt to change people’s comprehensive conceptions in public. It is that when we are deliberating together about the public principles by which we are all going to be governed, we should ideally appeal to reasons that most people can endorse.

I do think there is a kind of rhetorical problem or tension when one shifts from publicly arguing over comprehensive conceptions (”There is no God! Free will is a lie! You are continuous with the apes!”) to publicly arguing about political principles in Rawls-approved tones. If you’re perceived as an aggressive flack for a particular comprehensive view, people will have a hard time taking you seriously when you attempt to set out an argument designed to appeal even to the very people you’ve just publicly accused of being dangerously blinkered. People will suspect you’re being tricksy, trying to pull a fast one.

So it’s probably tough to be a well-known comprehensive gladiator and a trusted voice of public reason all at the same time.

Andrew Sullivan’s diagnosis of the real problem with the Democrats (TNR Online sub only, I’m afraid) is pretty astute. I think he’s really go it. The Republicans do a better job of tappin into America’s go-get-em-tiger!-ness. Sullivan finds it both in Team America and in Pixars new flick, The Incredibles. This is what Sullivan says it’s about:

The fundamental moral of the movie is that this restraint is wrong and needs to be overcome: Letting the talented earn the proud rewards of their labor, and the fruits of their destiny, harms no one and actually helps those in the greatest need.

Is this a moral for the religious right? Hardly. The Incredibles in some ways portrays normal American life as stultifying. Its brutal parody of family squabbles is by no means an encomium to traditionalism. It’s not anti-family, of course. But it is pro-talent and pro-opportunity. It is in favor of the urge to get out there and achieve things without apology. Within the right-left rubric of American cultural discourse, the movie is therefore rightward-tilting. And that’s why many critics on the left have decried it.

A few paragraphs later, he offers the diagnosis:

This is what the left has lost sight of. Americans tend to believe that talent needs no apology; that action is often better than complaint; that their own country, despite its many faults, is still a force for great good in the world. The left tends to view things a little differently.

This strikes me as basically correct. The Republicans somehow seem more hospitable to simply human efficacy, the desire to stretch out, to accelerate to a good speed without all those damn speed bumps, to just do it, and all that. Twice the achievement, half the whining. Something like that. (And maybe this explains why I seem to keep dating Republicans.)

My review of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint is up over on Brainwash. Enjoy.

I once had a girlfriend who, after we parted ways, went through a number of, let us say, transitions in her sexual self-image. She explained it to me like this: “First, I thought I was red. Then, I thought I was blue. Now, I realize that I’m purple.”

We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that gets in my craw is the fairly widespread assumption that individual people are either red or blue, which is just silly if you think about it for a millisecond.

Now, I’m a guy with an extremely “blue” sensibility. I choose an urban lifestyle. I have my metrosexual moments (to mention another moribund sociological notion). I am not a man of faith. I like gay people (yes, all of them, on principle) and think they ought to be able to get married if they want. I am, as they say, “pro-choice”. The Ten Commandments should not be posted in courthouses. You should be able to burn a flag. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll? You betcha!

But I have a fairly “reddish” Iowa background, of which I am fond. I do not find it at all difficult to identify with God n’ Guns conservatives, and in many ways admire their ethos of faith, family, work, and responsibility. Their rhetoric comes more naturally to me, stirs me more easily, even if I’m sometimes embarrassed by that fact. I helped a little bit in the Pat Robertson campaign in Iowa in ‘88, because my best friend’s family was involved in it, and I liked the idea of it at the time. I find I generally get more viscerally aggravated by liberal moralizing than conservative moralizing, which, for some reason, I tend to find comical or surreal.

I am, like my open-minded former paramour, purple. No, in fact, I reject the spectrum. I’m brown, dammit. (And what can brown do for you?) It’s just very very weird–well not weird, normal, but annoying–that people should suddenly actually integrate into their sense of identity this redness or blueness–colors meant to represent a damnably artificial left/right political spectrum. One of the reasons I dislike politics, and especially our winner-take-all system, is that it creates a pressure to pick sides in a way that does damage to authenticity. I resent being asked implicitly to join my intellectual urban fellows in therapeutic anti-red scorn-heaping excercises, as if “red” and “blue” actually means something interesting. Let’s all just stick to hating the stupid and pompous, qualities that know no hue.

I watched The Barbarian Invasions last night, and I’ve got to say that it may be the most libertarian film I’ve ever seen. The “sensual socialist” father, a former college professor, is warehoused in a crowded hospital that is falling apart in Montreal. He is afforded a decent death only by his rich, capitalist son, whose love and compassion, because of his means, is not limited to earnest good intentions. The film is a damning idictment of socialized medicine, sixties radical intellectuals (”Existentialism; Marxist-Leninism; Maoism; Deconstructionism. Is there an ‘ism’ we did not worship? Cretinism.”) and, among other things, drug prohibition. The father dies in dignity through the judicious use of heroin and assisted suicide. It was, at points, a bit much. But, otherwise, it was moving, human, and genuinely insightful in the way that movies almost never are.

I’m delighted to see that Alan Hollinghurst has been awarded the Booker Prize for his new book The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst is one of my favorite authors, his Swimming Pool Library being one of the most exquisitely written novels I’ve ever read. I hadn’t known he had a new novel out, and I’m excited to read it.

[NB: If you buy Hollinghurst novels from Amazon, Amazon will infer that you like "gay" novels. Not that there is... you know.]

[Link via Marginal Revolution.]