Exit Cave Right

Moving Soon

2008-10-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'll be moving Exit Cave Right to WordPress within the next few days, so stay tuned. The new address will just be: http://exitcaveright.com. Check in if you want to see ECR's new look in development. And, as always, please send any comments to exitcaveright@gmail.com.

Searching for the Conservative Soul

2008-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

By way of Andrew Sullivan, I came across this interesting blessay ("blog essay"--did I just coin that?) by Nicola Karass at Iqra'i. It is a provocative reflection on how the author developed a conservative political-philosophical outlook, and adds some new criteria to my own ongoing study of what separates the conservative from the liberal mind. Karass emphasizes the importance of duty and community (and tradition) as bulwarks against a solipsistic nihilsm that can make us susceptible to totalitarian ideologies. But she seems to see these commitments to society and responsibility as mutually exclusive with the idea of reason. This I find, well, unreasonable.

I do, however, get the point: we should recognize that pure reason can never provide a complete and coherent basis for understanding the meaning of life, so we must emphasize love, family, and society as the fundamental pillars of our existence. This is difficult to accept because it sounds like an argument in support of traditional institutions simply for fear of the consequences of not believing in them. And I have never been comfortable with arguments that say something should be considered "good" simply because the alternative is "bad." If we do accept that community is good because individualism is bad, how are we to take the next step to determine what the right kind of community is? How are we to determine the nature of true human virtue, the kind of virtue that can sustain community over the long-term? How else can we arrive at answers to these questions but through unaided reason?

Speaking of the tension between individualistic rationalism and collectivist traditionalism, here is the author's mini-autobiographical thesis on the history of the twentieth century (one of my favorite topics):

I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man's isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity. Those were the things I had hated in myself, and they were the conditions I saw described in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.
If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he'll cling to ideology as though his life depends on it. (His ego does.) Wherever it takes him, he won't dare to let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating in the abyss again. I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself.

This is a thoughtful diagnosis, but it implies that millions and millions of individual existential crises were what allowed the utopian ideologies of Hitler and Lenin to win the hearts and minds of the people; that the rapid and sweeping acceptance of Enlightenment rationalism, and its subsequent inability to answer our most fundamental questions, paved the way to totalitarianism. But do "the masses" really have existential crises?

There is another take on this old story, and I will paraphrase here from Isaiah Berlin's shrewd analysis of it. Berlin argued, if I have read him correctly, that the roots of totalitarianism (especially Nazism) can be found in German romanticism, and that romanticism was a conscisous response to, and rejection of, the French Enlightenment, rather than an ideology that merely profitted from its abject failure. In other words, there is a simpler explanation for why things turned out the way they did: human beings are naturally inclined to gravitate toward ideology, any ideology, that makes our incoherent world intelligible. This understanding, I think, is what must form the core of any truly conservative outlook, an acceptance of incoherence. On this point, I think that Karass would agree. Indeed, she says that this is exactly what led her away from "Enlightenment fundamentalism." But similarly, an uncritical faith in community and institutions (which I do not believe she is advocating, but that seems to follow from her arguments) was the psychological pathology at the heart of romanticism and its murderous, nihilistic offspring. It was an emphasis on one's own "special" community to the exclusion, and often persecution, of the "other," whether that community was defined as the Aryan race or the workers of the world.

So Karass seems to have gone from one end to the other. I would substitute her categorical rejection of rationalism and a firm commitment to community with the following maxim: It is the conservative's job to remain permanently uncomfortable with existence. Because it is precisely when we think we have arrived at final and comprehensive answers--whether they reside in reason or in community--that we actually become susceptible to totalitarianism. We shoud firmly accept, as the late Judge Learned Hand once declared, that "The true spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right." This belief was at the heart of the American Founding, and it is, sadly, a belief that has all but evaporated in today's destructive partisan politics.

Conservatism should be about ideas and ideals, not about emotional appeals to interpersonal connections, and there is simply no way to arrive at the "right" ideas without reason. This element of balance is what seems to be missing from the worldview that Karass has arrived at.

A final world on politics and its relationship to conservative thought: There have been some largely unnoticed but profoundly important calls for a revival of the great conservative tradition of intellectual discourse--these calls must continue. The Republican Party in the United States has done terrible harm to the conservative tradition, and this is why it is now perhaps more important than ever to separate the party's politics from conservative philosophy. This is why I was a bit concerned with the title that Karras chose for her essay (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy). Though I realize she meant her title as a humurous barb (and I appreciate the allusion to Dr. Strangelove), if true conservatism is to achieve the revival it deserves, we must divorce it completely from the general disaster that has been the presidency of George W. Bush.

As a friend of mine recently remarked about the GOP: "If I want open borders, big government, affirmative action, and a messianic foreign policy I will just vote Democrat." It is a shame that we have come to a point where this comment rings true, and that we have commentators like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, in their book Grand New Party, essentially conceeding defeat to the progressive, administrative state, and trying to determine how to move forward by making big government work for Republican principles, whatever those happen to be today. Despite discouraging treatises such as this one, there is a noble tradition of conservative thought out there in need of a new vanguard. That tradition does not need to be re-crafted today so much as re-emphasized and re-explained. But that will take creativity, time, and an immense amount of effort. I agree with Andrew Sullivan that essays like the one Karass has crafted are essential in this effort, and I applaud her immensely for having had the courage to share her story of intellectual evolution. My story is a similar one. So let us continue our search for the true nature of the conservative soul...

Quote of the Day II

2008-10-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

I have just finished the Mailer letters excerpts in the most recent New Yorker and I must say they were fascinating. I have not previously read much of his work, but his writing, even in this casual form, is wonderful. There is an honesty to it, a self-doubt, a willingness to question ideology under the weight of the world's immense complexity--these are rare things to come across in writing these days. I must read more of Mailer...

To William F. Buckley, Jr.
January, 1966
Dear Bill,
I send you the enclosed not because I love National Review so much, for I don’t—it’s not so good as it ought to be, and often it’s tiresome, especially when one knows in advance what your trusted old line contributors are going to say—but as a personal mark of respect to you. Your letter was the best letter I ever read by an editor asking for funds. . . .
One request. Please keep my contribution in the secret crypts. It is not that I fear public opinion so much as ceaseless repetition. Repetition kills the soul and I would not wish to spend one hundred evenings in succession explaining to various outraged and somewhat stupid people in calm clear fashion my complex motives for giving a gift to a magazine for which I feel no affection and to an editor with whom on ninety of a hundred points I must rush to disagree. They would not understand that good writing is good writing, and occasionally carries the day.
Yours,
Norman

Quote of the Day

2008-09-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

"I hate Russia (the govt. not the people), I do not admire her as you do. Admitting that her offensiveness and organization were dictated by the pressure of the world, the fact still remains that she stands now as a strangler to freedom of the individual, and I fear she is on a totalitarian trek from which there is no retreat."

-Norman Mailer, from a letter to Beatrice Mailer, February, 1946

This and other letters from Mailer were recently published in The New Yorker article In the Ring: Grappling With the Twentieth Century.

Trilling: The Liberal Imagination and its Discontents

2008-09-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

Louis Menand wrote an (occassionally) insightful essay on the novelist and critic Lionel Trilling for this week's New Yorker. It was Trilling's book, The Liberal Imagination, that put him on the map, says Menand, as it was one of the works, along with Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center, George Orwell's 1984, and Richard Crossman's The God That Failed, that "helped make the case for liberal anti-communism." This was of course a weighty debate in the years after World War II, as the Soviet machine made its presence felt and its intentions toward the West clear. There were a great many on the American Left in those days who were so worried about the totalitarian threat from right-wing fascism that they were blind to the totalitarian threat from left-wing Stalinism. It was Trilling and other liberals who had the intellectual courage to stand opposed to the naivete of many of their ideological comrades, and expose Soviet communism for what it truly was. Menand cites this excerpt from Trilling's letters, for example:

I expect a quantum of injustice in any imperium, expect contradictions as the price of order—what brings me to the puking-point is the fine feelings. And what brings me to the fighting-point is the increasingly sure sense that Stalinist power aims at the annihilation of anything that does not contribute to power. There has never been a power-ideology that so wished to destroy every human quality that did not add to itself.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trilling that comes out of Menand's essay is that not only was he critical of leftist supporters of the Soviet system, but that he had the integrity to question the very nature of modern liberalism itself. He saw literature, with its exposition of the great complexities of the human condition, as a kind of rebuttal to the liberal's faith in the possibility of finding a political system that could fulfill every imaginable progressive dream.

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique
relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

Later in the essay, a similar point is made about the facile liberal hope for unrelenting human progress:

When Freud published “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in 1930, Trilling wrote a review dismissing the book as absurd. But the magazine he wrote it for, The New Freeman, folded, and the review never appeared. That was when Trilling was still a Marxist. After 1950, he became infatuated with “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and especially with Freud’s notion of a “death drive.” The death drive is one of the most fantastic creatures in the Freudian menagerie, and Trilling took the concept exactly as Freud intended it: as naming an innate, biological resistance that people have to being made better. The death drive was designed to discredit the claim, made by renegade Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and, later on, Herbert Marcuse, that the right kind of political and economic change would do away with “discontent,” with neurosis. Freud’s argument, Trilling wrote in his last major work, “Sincerity and Authenticity,” “may be thought to stand like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life.”

Finally, Menand emphasizes Trilling's skepticism over the student revolts of the 1960s era, this not so much a case of liberal naivete over the tragic nature of the universe, but about the errors of political commitment motivated purely by a desire for a cause, rather than by the merits. The subject of Trilling's essay On the Teaching of Modern Literature, Menand tells us, was a complaint about the eagerness of his students at Columbia "to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive." And a few paragraphs later: "The students didn't really care about the issues; they simply wanted 'the gratifications of being political.'"

It requires vigilance, to be sure, to steer clear of such psychological minefields on the path to philosophical discovery.

Abuse at the LIRR

2008-09-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

Here is the first in what I know will be many more examples to be discussed on this blog of government agencies abusing their power as stewards of our tax dollars. There is no doubt that the private sector must bear some blame for its "excesses," but government officials aren't angels, either. This is a great data point in support of the arguments of free-marketeers and low-tax advocates, like me: is this how you want your money spent? On golf outings for retired railroad workers collecting thousands of dollars in disability? Key point:

In one six-month period, rain pay cost the railroad $1.1 million. “Some of these things are ridiculous,” said Gerard P. Bringmann, general chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council. “It makes absolutely no sense. Any company would go bankrupt that operates that way.”

BHL and the French Left

2008-09-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, in this week's NYT book review. BHL is an interesting character, one of those rare European leftists who has grown disillusioned with the European left. Hitchens says that "If you wanted to sum up his political outlook in a phrase, you would find yourself borrowing Orwell's remark that it's not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian. BHL, according to Hitchens, "insists" that the left "renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you." So here is one more example of the politico-philosophical evolution of the generation of 1968.

Adam Kirsch also reviews the book here in the New York Sun. Some money quotes:

Gone, he writes, are the left's inspiring and necessary ideals: its universalism, its love of justice, its sympathy with the oppressed, its commitment to truth-telling. In their place is a toxic brew of hatreds: of America, conceived as the imperial culprit behind all the world's crimes; of Israel and the Jews, who now occupy the same place in the left's demonology that they once held for the nationalist right; even of liberalism itself. Mr. Lévy compares the left — especially, but not exclusively, the French left — to a decomposing body, whose process of decay is releasing noxious pathogens...

...There is, first of all, the left's hatred of liberalism — the idea and the very word, which is anathema in French politics. This looks paradoxical to Americans, who are used to associating the word "liberal" with the left wing of the Democratic Party. But in Europe, liberal still carries its original 19th-century meaning as the philosophy of individual freedom; and this freedom, to the French left, is nothing but the Trojan horse of an all-devouring capitalism...

Mr. Lévy offers the best summary I have seen of [the left-wing] worldview, which can be glimpsed in the works of many influential left-wing philosophers and journalists. "We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey — a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world — and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former." After reading "Left in Dark Times," it is impossible to deny that the left, whatever its past glories — and Mr. Lévy remembers them all, from the Dreyfus affair to the events of 1968 — is now a danger to truly liberal values. A danger, despite its decrepitude: for as Mr. Lévy says, "even when they're not in charge of anything, ideas are what, for better or worse, drive, and allow us to change, the world."

Posturing Rebels, Then and Now

2008-09-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

This being the fortieth anniversary of that watershed year 1968, many of today's public intellectuals and artists who came-of-age during that era have been doing some critical reflecting on it. One prominent example was David Mamet's renunciation in the Village Voice of the ideas he accepted as "articles of faith" during the 1960s, namely, that government is corrupt and business exploitive. I have more recently come across a similar essay by another famous playwright--by way of a review of his latest play in The Weekly Standard--which appeared within days of Mamet's article in March, this one in The Sunday Times of London, and penned by Tom Stoppard.

While Mamet titled his piece "Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal," Stoppard opted for the less-inflammatory and somewhat more illustrative heading, "1968: The Year of the Posturing Rebel." And, it is important to note that, in Stoppard's case, he was not renouncing an ideology he had once fully embraced, but rather reaffirming an opposition to it that he had always held. Stoppard remembers that he was "embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent." He continues:

What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.

It is, of course, rather fitting that Isaiah Berlin shared similar sentiments on the matter, given that he has been such an inspiration for Stoppard's work (most notably, Berlin's writings on the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century provided much of the basis for the philosophical dimensions of The Coast of Utopia). As told by Michael Ignatieff in his biography of Berlin, regarding a lecture that the great historian of ideas gave in New York City in 1968 (when else?), "he saw the 1960s revolution as an uprising against the boredom, security, and lack of existential challenge in the post-war capitalist boom. He thought the anger was about psychological malaise, hypocrisy...alienation...class consciousness...and not oppression of the majority by a wicked or deluded minority."

This shrewd observation--that the left-wing rebels of the '68er generation were searching desperately for a grand cause based on which they could unite, and against which they could protest, but that would require a vast distortion of the truth, namely, that the inequalities in American society during those years were akin to the totalitarian oppressions that had brought Europe to its knees before and during the second World War--was a central argument, too, in Paul Berman's book Power and the Idealists. He remarked there that:

The New Left was a young people's movement motivated by fear...It was a fear that, at least in the Western countries, social progress rested on a lie, a fear that prosperity was theft, and Western wealth was Third World exploitation, a fear that Western civilization comprised a system of manipulation designed to mislead its own people and everyone else...It was a fear, in sum, that in World War II, fascism, and more specifically Nazism, had not been defeated after all--a fear that Nazism, by mutating, had continued to thrive into the nineteen-fifties and sixties and onward, always in new disguises...And so, the New Left in its youthful anxiety found its way to an old and mostly expired panic from its parents' generation, and bent over it, and fanned the dead embers, and breathed on them, and watched aghast as the dying flames leapt up anew...And with a disguised Nazism apparently in command at home and across the Western world circa 1968, the need for an extremely radical resistance seemed to cry out from every stone.

Again, it is remarkable to note the similarities between Berlin and Berman, and unfortunate that the latter seems not to have acknowledged the former in any of his writings. But the common theme here--the criticism of the radical uprisings of the 1960s all over the Western world--is a fascinating one, not least because of the intellectual journey that many have taken since then, as evinced my Mamet, Berman, and many others, who have looked back at that time, aghast at what they witnessed and what, in some cases, they took part in. It is the story of youthful idealism, transformed by the passage of time and a more mature sense of perspective about the very real freedoms that we are blessed with in this part of the world, and how they can be so easily forgotten, or taken for granted, or harshly criticized, all under the shadow of an imagined state of bondage.

J.S. Mill and the Liberal Conceit

2008-09-05T10:26:00.001-07:00

One of the many, many books that encumbers my shelf space but has as yet gone unread is the classic 1988 work by political philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. This is one of those books that, following the sage advice of French literature professor Pierre Bayard, I can feel comfortable discussing despite being unfamiliar with its contents, and because of its well known thesis: the "fatal conceit" of which Hayek was speaking was the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

One of the philosophical problems I would like to attempt to solve over the course of my career is the identification of the bedrock principles of the liberal, or left-leaning, brain as opposed to the conservative one. This insight from Hayek qualifies as a critical distinction between the two archetypes. Liberals tend to believe in the unlimited potential for human progress, and along with it in their own ability to shape human nature, or human institutions, to help fulfill those progressive objectives. In some liberal minds, it seems to me, this belief is so strong that it swells into a self-righteousness, a conceipt, so to speak, by which they define their very existence. I think that this helps to explain the contempt that many liberals have for those who disagree with them, and their unwillingness to consider arguments contrary to their views, even when the facts are stacked heavily against their policy choices.

Conservatives, on the other hand, do not believe that human progress is inevitable, and tend to emphasize the importance of custom, and the potential consequences that can be created by drastic attempts to reshape society. Too often, liberal objectives require policies that simply defy the inclinations of human nature, both individually and collectively. Conservatives believe that the world must be dealt with as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

This short essay by Roger Kimball in Standpoint discusses the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and the consequences of his progressive beliefs. Kimball identifies Mill's work as a foundational component of modern liberalism (along with that of Rousseau). On Mill's utilitarian program, Kimball argues that "It is a recipe that has proven irresistible to those infatuated with the spectacle of their own virtue." This strikes a divisive tone and threatens to undermine any and all noble attempts to pick up the downtrodden, but nevertheless, there is something to it--the self-righteouss spirit, the naive belief in unlimited and uninterrupted human progress, the subordination of reason to emotion, that rest at the bottom of the liberal program.

Kimball cites one particularly interesting example of Mill's philosophy that serves to expose a flaw in the liberal armor--his support for "experiments in living" and his contempt for tradition. With these corollaries firmly in place, Mill argued that all human progress had been the result of social, moral, and intellectual innovators that, in their own time, had been shunned by their societiers as dangerous radicals. Mill argued, on the basis of this observation, that innovation in these realms should be forcefully encouraged. But as Kimball astutely points out:

Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse...This means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organisation of society.

To my mind, this is a good example of the difference between the liberal heart and the conservative mind. The liberal "thinks" with his emotions, and thus looks on instances of human progress with congratulatory sentiments, turning away from the negative outcomes of radical changes gone awry. The conservative mind, on the other hand, looks not only on isolated examples of when innovator X produced human benefit Y, but on the more general category of the causal relationships between innovations and their aftermaths. The sum total is not nearly as sunny as the best-known parts.

The Steel Cube Was Brilliant

2008-09-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Toward the beginning of Manhattan, one of Woody Allen's greatest films, a hilarious encounter takes place at the Museum of Modern Art between Isaac (Allen's character) and Mary (played by Diane Keaton). While discussing some of the works they have just viewed, it becomes clear that their stark disagreements about which were "good" and which were "bad" are very much a consequence of their differing evaluative perspectives, Isaac taking a sensory, and Mary a much more intellectual, that is to say, philosophical or analytical, approach. As just one example, when Isaac dismisses a "steel cube" that was on display, Mary replies, "Now that was brilliant to me...to me it was very textural, you know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and it had a marvelous kind of negative capability."

I have no idea what Mary means by any of this, and I don't think anyone is supposed to. This is Allen's way of poking fun at the haughty intellectual persona. But doesn't there have to be more to art than sheer visual appeal? How do we evaluate a painting or a sculpture or a building or a novel or a film or a poem? What is "good" art? Isn't there a set of aesthetic criteria inherent in the simple question: "do you like this, or not?" I think that there is. Otherwise, we would fall into a kind of artistic relativism where Michelangelo is no different from graffiti, and Beethoven on par with the latest winner of American Idol.

Though I spend much less time these days strolling around art museums than I did during my six months in Europe last year, I have caught a few exhibits at the Met and MOMA, and continue to think about the nature of art and how we evaluate it. This essay by Richard Eyre from the UK magazine Standpoint makes an effort to begin to define what we mean by "art" as opposed to "culture." It suggests some of the key characteristics of the former:

Art – good or bad, high or low – must have form, it must have shape. It’s a way of knowing the world, of giving form and meaning to things that seem formless. A work of art has to have ambition beyond wanting to please the audience or appease fashion, a desire to examine the world – people or nature or society – and make it look or sound or seem new. A work of art should introduce something to the world that didn’t exist before...Art is everything that politics isn’t: politics generalises about people, art particularises. Art is about the “I” in life, not about the “we”, about private life rather than public life. There has to be a complexity about art but that’s not the same as obscurity...There must be mystery, a sense of unknowability in a work of art – as there is in every human being. In art reality must be given the chance to be mysterious and fantasy the chance to be commonplace. The DNA of art is metaphor: that’s the genetic cell without which nothing can be mutated by craft into art.

Art strives towards the mythic – towards seeing heaven in a grain of sand. Art is unquestionably a form of magic, conjuring something from nothing – sounds from the air on a musical instrument, a human being in paint on a stretch of canvas, a world with a pen on a page of paper. Art must be serious about itself. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be funny, but it means it can’t be trivial. But seriousness alone – any more than sincerity alone – isn’t enough in itself. There has to be an element of pleasure in art, of sensual enjoyment – be it of a combination of sounds, of words, or textures, or of images. Art has to ravish the senses, but not only do that. There has to be a moral sense. You have to be able to feel that the artist has a view that human beings possess a moral sensibility. That’s not the same as the artist being a moralist – or being a “good” person. The artist may be saying “this is how you should live your life” but it must be inferred, not preached. Art is not polemic.

There must be passion in art. Passion gives us a sense of life lived more intensely, with more meaning – more joy, more sorrow. “We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve,” said Victor Hugo. We can spend our period of reprieve in a state of listlessness, or we can fill the period of our death sentence with experience – lived experience or the experience we gain from art. Art reflects, expresses, invokes and describes the ambiguity of humanity. Whatever the form of art, however realistic or however fantastical, it offers up a commentary on being alive, on the infinite messiness of humanity. Art doesn’t improve our behaviour or civilise us. Art is useless. It doesn’t clothe the poor or feed the hungry. It’s as useless as, well . . . life, but it’s precisely our awareness of the uselessness of life that makes us want to struggle to give it purpose, and to give that purpose meaning through art.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote this: “The love of our neighbour means being able to say to him: What are you going through? It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not as a specimen from a social category labelled ‘unfortunate’ but as a man exactly as we are. To forget oneself briefly, to identify with a stranger to the point of fully recognising him or her, is to defy necessity.” Art is a way of “defying necessity”, drawing us into a heightened awareness of other people’s feelings and other people’s lives. It enables us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

This is a lot to digest, and there are some points I disagree with that will be addressed in a future post. For now, I will share some thoughts from a trip to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam last summer, when it occurred to me that, perhaps, there are three primary planes across which you can assess a work of art: aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual.

An aesthetic assessment is about pure visual appeal. I think of Monet in this category, for example. His paintings are just magnificent to look at, the impressionistic reproduction of natural beauty that he mastered so remarkable. But why, exactly, do I find it remarkable? What one person considers beautiful, another may think trivial. Who defines the standards for a visually appealing painting, or a delightful melody, or a striking city skyline? Is the evaluation of these kinds of things purely subjective? And that is really what this discussion is about: investigating the existence of objective evaluative standards for human creations. I assume that there have been studies on this topic in the field of neuroscience, where brain functionality can be measured based on various stimuli. I will have to look into this further, because, as with so many other fields where philosophy and empirical science are dependent on, rather than at odds with, each other, it would be a step forward to understand the connection between our thought processes and our physical sensations when presented with a particular aesthetic.

An emotional assessment is about what a work of art says to the viewer, what memories it prompts him to recall, what feelings it induces. This, I suppose, is a purely subjective category. It is all about the individual, the private as opposed to the public, as Eyre indicated in his essay. I would also include in this category works that induce empathy with other human beings, another important characteristic of art that Eyre identified. Of course, empathy was a fundamental part of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy, as he thought it critical to the survival of tolerance (defined as acceptance of difference rather than as acceptance of all things as equally valid) in a liberal society. In this context, to the extent that art encourages empathy, it is essential to the Western conception of freedom, and anathema to the totalitarian regime. Perhaps this is where we can begin to answer the question: what is the purpose of art and why do we need it?

The intellectual assessment of art is a very broad category. It is, in general terms, about the ideas that constitute the work, and, more specifically, these ideas may be about style, history, philosophy, or theology. The Biblical scenes depicted in Renaissance painting come immediately to mind here, as they can be evaluated across all four of these sub-categories. I would also place much of modern art here because it seems to me to be much more about the technique and how it differs from most aesthetic movements of the past, which were about representations of reality rather than abstractions from it.

But this is just a rough outline of how I have begun to classify and analyze things. Of course no single work of art is to be bound to any particular category, and in fact most works could probably be evaluated by any of these criteria. For me, purely subjective aesthetic judgments have never been enough. I want to understand the ideas behind art so that I can defend properly the things I like and the things that I don't. There are some obvious parallels between this discussion and the broader one about moral relativism. I suppose that the debate about subjectivity and objectivity in art is a component of the larger debate between timeless, universal principles and historicist, culturally-specific values. Yes, that sounds right to me. More to come after further reflection.

Farewell, Sabbatical

2008-08-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

It has been a good six months since my last post, and now that the summer is nearing an end, it seems about time to shuck off my isolationist robes, and come out to see the sun. It was Allan Bloom who said that there are two harsh disciplines which make a man serious: community and solitude. I have gone a far longer way toward mastering the latter up to this point, and perhaps it is now the right time to engage the former. And so, I have returned to the blogosphere as one step in that direction.

As described in an earlier post about the intentions behind this blog, there are, I think, three of them: to describe and share thoughts about my readings in Western civilization and, even broader, the full history of ideas, whether from the "West" or "East"; to discuss other philosophical questions that arise from my general reading of the news, academic journals, and cultural criticism; and, given that the United States will choose its forty-fourth president in two months, to discourse on the issues involved in this election. Full disclosure: I am supporting John McCain for President.

So to start things off, I will share two recent thoughts:

1. In a conversation last night about U.S. foreign policy in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, I described the strange bedfellows that the past several years have produced. This is not a very unique observation, but it is an intriguing one. The post-9/11 debates about the use of U.S. military force and the propriety of humanitarian intervention have built metaphorical bridges between the traditional left and the traditional right--two of them, in fact. The first is the alliance between left-leaning liberal hawks and right-wing neoconservatives, who both advocate for the use of force against our illiberal enemies, though I suppose for slightly different reasons. Nevertheless, this alliance is frequently blamed for paving a smoother road for the Bush administration's adventure into Baghdad. I believe that this topic is the focus of a recent book called A Pact With the Devil, by Tony Smith, one of my former professors.

The other alliance, before more uncomfortable than the first, is between left-wing pacifists and conservative isolationists, who saw Iraq as an unnecessary expenditure of blood and treasure, though, again, for slightly different reasons. This topic deserves further reflection in a future post, I think.

2. I frequently use Arts & Letters Daily to find new and interesting essays on the web--it is an excellent resource. The other day, it pointed me to an article in The American Conservative about how libertarians have begun to adopt (or adapt) the philosophy of John Rawls to their cause. Without going into detail on the article, I will relay something that Michael Ignatieff said in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, one of my favorite thinkers of the 20th century. Toward the end of his book, Ignatieff remarked that American liberalism in the latter half of the 20th century went in an undoubtedly Rawlsian direction, rather than a Berlinian one. This is telling, and also troubling. Rawls postulated a philosophical system for the organization of society, the very thing that Berlin argued against as he gazed out at the landscape of destruction that was wrought by the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, all of which were themselves based on rigid political-philosophic "systems." Rawls of course had no intention of setting forth the seeds of a new totalitarian movement when he published A Theory Of Justice in 1971, but as Berlin might have said, any attempt to mold a perfect society out of the crooked timber of humanity is bound, sooner or later, to end in disaster.

An Explanatory Note

2008-02-27T16:33:00.000-08:00

I realize that my first post here was a bit obscure, and likely left you wondering what Exit Cave Right is all about. First, an initial word on Jonathan Swift and A Modest Proposal. Professor Jaffa obviously did not point me to this text for chronological or stylistic reasons, but for moral and philosophical ones. In other words, the pamphlet does not occupy a starting point in time from which all other literary themes flow, nor does it represent the beginnings of a new artistic form. What it does do is present a practical dilemma juxtaposed with a moral one. Jaffa was implicitly telling me that any investigation of Western thought had to be framed by the general question that is asked by the particular circumstances of Swift's 18th century Ireland. That question is simply this: what is "right" as opposed to what is merely useful? A subsequent post will explore this question in light of how and why Swift's satire poses it.

This brings us to another query: What is this blog all about? I envision two complementary purposes for it. The first concerns the already-stated task at hand, that is, a thorough study of the history of Western ideas. This objective itself raises practical dilemmas (where to begin? what path to follow? where to end?), as well as a theoretical paradox (if there is, in fact, a distinct tradition that we can fairly call "the West," what exactly is it? what are its components, and is the sum of those components greater than its parts? what "Western" ideas and ideals have been influenced by "non-Western" ones, and vice versa?). I have only very preliminary answers to this barrage of questions, but hope, through the outlet that this website provides, to gradually move toward more profound and more complete versions of those answers, and to begin to grasp a greater understanding of, and a greater appreciation for, the subject under examination.

So, the first purpose of the blog is to allow me to organize, save, and share my thoughts as I proceed on this quixotic quest (and to benefit from the wisdom of the few select readers whose interest I may capture). The second purpose (and the two are mutually reinforcing) will be to comment on matters, whether contemporary or historic, practical or artistic, that I happen across, even if they may, if only for a moment, wrench my project from its directed path. And, indeed, these may be necessary detours, for what is an understanding of the past without recognizing its ability to illuminate the present? And toward what end go the judgments of today and our visions for the future without grasping what has gone before?

Harry Jaffa and Jonathan Swift

2008-02-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2005 I had the good fortune to find myself seated across from the eminent conservative scholar Harry V. Jaffa at a dinner party in southern California. I'd graduated from college a little more than a year before this encounter, and despite the stamp on my official academic transcript that deemed me a major in the "Classics," I felt that my understanding of the roots of Western civilization was far from complete. To rectify this unacceptable state of affairs, it occurred to me that I might ask Professor Jaffa where to begin if I was to embark on a personal intellectual journey through the philosophy, theology, and history of the rich cultural tradition that I was so much in awe of.

I posed the question, my voice quivering just a bit, and tried to anticipate his response. There were four likely candidates, I thought: the Old Testament, Plato's Republic, the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, and Homer's Iliad. I was wrong on all counts.

"Jonathan Swift," I heard him say.

Excuse me!?

"Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, are you familiar with it?"

I've heard the name, yes.

"You should begin there."

Baffled at first, the Professor kindly explained his instructions. I eventually understood. Then, on my way back to the east coast, in truly fortuitous fashion, the airport bookstore happened to have one last copy of Swift's famous pamphlet, albeit one that was subsumed by a larger text that included the author's more famous Gulliver's Travels. I took the paperback off the shelf, approached the check-out counter, and handed over four dollars and ninety-five cents.

The journey had begun.