Expensive Lipstick

An article on the front page of the Times today (you see, kids, the NYT also comes in this hard-copy format called a 'newspaper'...) documents a change in tactics among conservatives keen to expand their influence on the nation's campuses. Instead of aggressively polemical attacks on the usual betes noires (postmodernism, multiculturalism, ethnic studies, feminism, etc.), right-wing financiers and foundations now tout their pet projects as nonpartisan efforts to 'embrace a broader range of thought'. In practice, however, it amounts to funding initiatives by conservative academics that adopt a more positive stance to 'Western culture' and offer a 'triumphal interpretation of American history'.

There's no need to see in this some kind of insidious plot: it's perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the way American history is being interpreted and transmitted to the next generation. But--to quote Edmund Burke out of context--'in order for us to love our country, our country must be lovely'. There may be much we can learn from conservative political thought: those who disagree with Burke's ultimate assessment of the French Revolution may still have much to learn from his ideas concerning the value of the past or the most prudent pace of change; those who recoil from Carl Schmitt's politics may yet benefit from a tussle with his political theory. But that is a different kind of education than what these determined triumphalists and soft-sell culture warriors seem to be proposing.

WWABS?

The results of a recent poll, we are told, augur a fundamental shift in the American public's moral philosophy: three years ago, a majority of Americans believed in absolute, acontextual standards of right and wrong; today, that majority, by a slim margin, inclines toward casuistry. What would Allan Bloom say? He was decrying creeping, postmodern moral relativism back in the eighties, when we were apparently still moral absolutists...

Ethnovideography, Etc.

I've just discovered the work of a British social anthropologist named Alan Macfarlane: he's got hundreds of videos up on YouTube, and apparently he's cuckoo for the uses of video for teaching and disseminating anthropological ideas. He posts ethnographic videos of any number of social rituals (he's done fieldwork in Japan, Nepal, China, and other parts of Asia); interviews with thinkers of interest for anthropology and related disciplines (I just spent an hour raptly watching a conversation with George Steiner, was less enthralled by a recording of a seminar with Ernest Gellner); and most helpfully for teachers of social theory, extremely lucid, well-organized introductions to various social theorists and fields of inquiry (Macfarlane's rather low-key, tweedy presentations gradually seduce).

Right now I'm in the middle of a fascinating presentation by the anthropologist Piers Vitebski, recorded by Macfarlane, on love, death, and forgetting.



In part Vitebski recounts, orally and via his own videorecordings, the shamanistic practices of the Sora of India, who rely on holy men (but mostly holy women) to channel the spirits of their dead loved ones in order to talk to them. As I was reflecting on the dilemmas of the ethnographer regarding, say, the suspensions of judgment and disbelief necessary to do this kind of fieldwork (I'm guessing these are pretty naive reflections for anybody more familiar with ethnographic methodology), I was suddenly reminded of our own practices of mourning and remembrance: is not the most salient characteristic of all our recent most successful memorials the fact that they allow the bereaved the chance to speak to the dead?

Signs of the Apocalypse, Pt. II

The crisis continues because nobody knows what anything is worth. You simply cannot have a functioning market under such circumstances--from an assessment of the Bush Administration's latest attempt to stop the bleeding.

Eep.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Pt. I

When you dig deeper at what college is set up to be, college is supposed to make you a money-making machine. ... [players who graduate from Princeton] are still going to make N.F.L. money or have N.F.L.-type success--Roger Hughes, Princeton football coach.

Wow. This from a story about that rare kid who puts his education before big-time college football and opts to play football at Princeton instead of Florida.

Hey kid, life's not about making millions from an NFL career. It's just about making millions.

Pop Quiz

Quick--what's the Bush doctrine? By now, everybody knows that Sarah Palin couldn't answer that question; clearly, there cannot be too many heartbeats between this hastily tutored hockey mom and the Presidency.

Or so people have said (by 'people', I seem to mean simply 'New York Times Op-Ed columnists'). But why should her performance on this particular question be the dealbreaker? Charlie Gibson quizzed Palin as if he were asking her to define the Monroe Doctrine, or to identify the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks--you know, stuff any well-educated person should know about. But why should we expect her to be able to identify the one policy associated with a term that, so far as I can see, has in fact been associated with a number of differing policies?

I'm not sure George W. Bush would be able to define the Bush doctrine. And that's not because I think he's dumb; I don't. (I think he's unwise.)

So the issue isn't whether Palin can pin the right label on the right policy, but what she thinks of the policy itself. And that's where people should be worried: as Maureen Dowd puts it,

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

Same Old Song?

Frank Rich is one of my favorite bloviators, but his account this last Sunday of how Obama outwitted the other bloviators over the course of the Democratic Convention struck me as containing more wishful thinking than he ought to indulge in. ( I'm not gonna go into details at this time; I'll just assert this without argument and move on.) Meanwhile, David Kirkpatrick reports that the Right--especially the Religious Right--seem to be doing some bloviator-beatdowns of their own, as McCain lurches so far to starboard (with the selection of Palin, the surrender of the party platform to Phyllis Schafly [!], etc.) that now even James Dobson is along for the voyage.

Seems like just yesterday that some observers, while refraining from obituaries, were writing decline narratives for the 'conservative movement' (somehow, this was a movement in which Jerry Falwell and Paul Wolfowitz were practically rubbing shoulders, philosophy-wise).

Come to think of it, some observers really did write obits. As Rich saw it a little more than a year ago, Rudy Giuliani's short-lived 'Big Mo' showed that the conservative base was singing a refrain that no one would want to hear come election time ('The Karl Rove theory that Republicans cannot survive without pandering to religious-right pooh-bahs is yet another piece of Bush dogma lying in ruins').

Well, there's no accounting for taste, they say.