5.11.04

Conservative Angst

Without addressing "why we lost, and how we can win next time," let me offer a few preliminary thoughts on the larger issue of the cultural conservative renaissance that's become big news in the wake of wins by George Bush, a bunch of Republican congresspeople, and 11 anti-marriage ballot measures. Let's start with a statement of the issue from Timothy Burke (via someone, but I forget who):

From the perspective of social and religious conservatives, their campaign to capture the government is a defensive response to attacks from the late 1960s through to the 1980s on the central mechanisms of their own social and cultural reproduction. Abortion rights, feminism, the expansion of free speech, the increased legal rigidity in interpreting church-state separation, and so on: these are hot-button issues not just for and of themselves, but because of them has symbolically come to stand in for a perception of a larger and more pervasive attempt to make religious and social conservatism a historical rather than continuing phenomenon.

As I see it, it's not that secularists* are determined to keep pushing until they eradicate conservative Christianity, or (just) that conservatives think that's the case. It's that conservatives doubt the ability of their own culture to survive alongside a more secular one within a liberal (in the broad sense) political framework. The essence of political liberalism is to expand the range of choice. Liberalism says that conservative culture is fine so long as participants choose it from a menu that contains other reasonable options, such as secularism.

Within this liberal choice framework, a secular materialist culture is seductive. It has helped to undermine other cultures -- from fundamentalist Islam to traditional Native American cultures.

Cultural conservatives recognize that this seduction is not simply an expression of the inherent preferrability of secularism (as the extreme libertarian view would have it). Rather, it's in part a result of the liberal individual choice framework -- indeed, how could a fairly hedonistic culture not have a lot of success when the principle of choice is individual preference? That framework undermines the kind of solidarity mechanisms that conservative culture needs to function. So they -- like the pre-Lenin Marxists who saw a simultaneous worldwide revolution as necessary to make Communism work -- hope that they can impose their vision nationwide. Traditional marriage must be safeguarded by taking away from everyone the options of serial monogamy or same-sex marriage, for example.

I happen to believe that the liberal choice framework and some form of secularist culture are the better options. I'm cautiously optimistic that secularism is too widespread for any move toward Falwelltopia to ultimately succeed. But the cultural revivals among Native American tribes suggest that all may not be lost for cultural conservatives. What's necessary is for them to focus on a reconstructed conservative culture that is compatible with and appealing under the liberal framework, rather than seeking to reverse that framework or forcibly eliminate their competitors under it. To to that would require offering an alternative to the weaknesses of secularism (such as the alienation created by consumerism) rather than attempting to imitate secularism's successes (such as with self-consciously "trendy" pop evangelicalism).

*Here, as before, defined very broadly, to include even many mainline Protestants.
Stentor Danielson, 17:29, ,

Four More Articles

OK. I think I've waited out the need to do any post-election venting or soul-searching. Instead, I'd like to do some academic griping.

Mainstream academics like to make disparaging comments about the amount of contentless blather that you see from more leftist (Marxist and postmodernist) scholars -- all that trendy and incomprehensible verbiage just covers up the fact that they don't really have anything to say. The exaggerated version of this critique is off base, but it's true that the postmodern emperor spends a disturbing amount of time running around nude. That said, the mainstream literature -- at least within the field of the human dimensions of environmental issues, which is what I'm most familiar with -- is hardly free of that sin. They just do it more transparently. Article after article rehashes the same vague generalities. If the Stockholm Environment Institute shouldn't waste its time if it's going to put out another report coming to the shocking conclusion that some people are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change and that soundbite versions of all the major principles of justice indicate that we should protect them. The academic left takes a lot of flak for being overtly (and ineffectually) political, but mainstream writers seem to be following the model of politicians rather than of cumulative science -- the main difference between Karl Rove and Roger Kasperson* is that more people listen to Rove's repetition of a few talking points.

*There's a bit of hyperbole here, of course -- for example, I'd count Kasperson's social amplification model of risk as a substantive contribution to knowledge.
Stentor Danielson, 17:24, ,

2.11.04

Departmental Feud

Someone here is trying to be provocative. The philosophy house stands right next to the women's studies house. In the window directly facing women's studies, someone has put up a big "W stands for Women" sign.
Stentor Danielson, 14:34, ,

1.11.04

Predictions

I don't have any particular expertise in predictions, but it's expected of bloggers to make a guess. I'm in a pretty pessimistic mood at the moment, so I'm going to call the popular vote 49%-48% for Bush. My guess is that Bush will pick up Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa, giving him 286 electoral votes to Kerry's 252. I don't expect the Democrats to recapture either house of Congress.

Now let's pray I'm wrong.
Stentor Danielson, 14:36, ,

31.10.04

One More Hobbit Note

The Times may have chosen a skull photo for its Homo floresiensis story, but amazingly it uses "Man" to refer to humanity.

The article goes on to speculate a lot about whether Homo floresiensis and other as-yet-undiscovered small human species could be the inspiration for legends about elves, dwarves, leprechauns, etc. I'm skeptical of that, except in certain very local situations. For starters, I'm skeptical that there were too many diminutive human species in other parts of the world, but nearly every culture has stories about little people. Furthermore, Occam's razor suggests that the variation in heights among Homo sapiens should be plenty to inspire the idea of even smaller creatures (not to mention that it's beyond the realm of possibility to find a species of Homo the size of a brownie or leprechaun, so we know there's at least some extrapolation going on in myth-making). To really have a basis for saying that Homo floresiensis was the inspiration for "little people" legends, there would have to be more parallels between the two than just their stature and the fact that they live in remote places.
Stentor Danielson, 13:16, ,