Dear Reader (and those of you who consume this newsletter in our new easy-to-swallow pill form),
I am at the beach for much of August. I know what you’re thinking: Jonah Goldberg + beach = more sexiness than the human mind can contemplate. If by sexiness, you mean sweatiness, you’re absolutely right. I am descended from a desert people, but spending our diaspora years spent eating fatty cured meats and smoked fish while compounding interest rates and running from Kossacks have apparently resulted in a genetic abnormality that causes me to sweat like Burl Ives moving a piano while wearing Huggy Bear’s Technicolor pimp coat.
The Delmarva coast has a lot going for it (Delmarva is not only a fitting name for a transvestite born with the name Del, it’s also an abbreviation for the intersection of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, in case you didn’t know). It’s quaint. The people are nice. It’s family oriented. What it doesn’t have going for it is climate. In California, New England, etc., you go to the ocean and you cool off. But this is figurative. You can sit outside and have a sandwich without looking and feeling like the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy threw water on her (“Helios! Look what you’ve done to me, I’m melting!”). In Delmarva, or so it seems during this heat wave, you have to be physically in the ocean to cool off. Step out of the ocean and within seconds you feel like a forgotten order of fries under a Denny’s heat lamp. It has the same climate as Washington, D.C., which, we all know, is a pestilential swamp where the horseflies and water snakes have been replaced with congressmen and senators. And that’s not a fair trade, because horseflies and water snakes leave your wallet alone when they bite.
Everything Old Is Still Old But Feels New (or Something)
It’s been a while since I read Eric Voegelin, one of my favorite philosophers – and a profound influence on my book – and my lips are still sore from the last time I did. Voegelin is the hardest interesting writing I’ve ever encountered. Uninteresting writing is always hard because, well, it’s uninteresting. The only thing that can give me a headache and put me to sleep faster than reading the impenetrable miasma of, say, John Dewey is a fish mallet to the back of the head – and that might be more desirable.
Anyway, one of the things I took away from Voegelin is that the nature of human existence is unchanging (though the revolution in genetic engineering might change that). Voegelin argued that the “structure of history” – what he calls “metaxy” (borrowing from Plato) – is permanent and unchanging. For example, the desire to create a heaven on earth is written into the human heart. All that ever changes is the latest snake-oil recipe for achieving it. The elixir may promise to turn everyday Joes into Aryan Man, Soviet Man, or Eugenic Man, but at the end of the day it’s the same bad wine in a new skin.
Voegelin understood that all of these isms must eventually fail because, again, you can’t change the structure of history. You cannot make this life perfect, because imperfection is written into the very nature of human existence. As Leo Strauss wrote (in a somewhat different context), “Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions.” For Voegelin – and countless theologians in the Judeo-Christian tradition – there is a “society” where there are no contradictions; it’s called “heaven.” When we try to create heaven here on earth, we are immanentizing the eschaton.
Modern man’s greatest hubris is to believe that we have stepped outside of history, transcended it, escaped from the algorithms that define it and that inevitably create problems. For instance, fans of Karl Marx think he was brilliant for noticing that capitalism has crises every now and then. Well, guess what? Everything under the sun, including the sun, has crises from time to time (for more on this point, see here).
Okay, I’ll dial back the philosophy stuff. But what I take from all of this is confirmation of the basic conservative insight that there’s nothing new under the sun. Many of the things we think are new are really ancient dynamics presenting themselves in new ways. (Ancient may be the wrong word because it suggests that they are subject to the vicissitudes of time. These dynamics are simply permanent.)
For me this translates into something of a mental parlor game. Whenever I hear that this or that trend or phenomenon is new, unprecedented, etc., I try to think “Okay, what if it isn’t new? It just looks new because it’s manifesting itself in a different form.” So I then ask, “What is it?”
For instance, many conservatives – including yours truly – get bent out of shape over political correctness. And quite often it is something to get bent out of shape over. Left-wing activists and intellectuals try to use political correctness to reshape the culture in ways they find desirable. But the appeal of political correctness for the average person isn’t the chance to advance some Marxist or feminist agenda. It’s to be polite. The bulk of political correctness is merely an attempt to come up with good manners. Understandably, blacks decided they didn’t want to be called negroes or colored anymore. Onetime Orientals are now Asians. Politically correct definitions of sexual harassment are, for the most part, only reasonable and persuasive to the extent that they overlap with old-fashioned definitions of boorishness. The perniciousness of political correctness is that it uses our natural sense of decency to hide other agendas. But the decency part remains, well, decent.
Or consider another possible example I’ve been noodling. One of the staples of the New Media era is the story of how so-and-so was caught doing X because he didn’t realize he or she was being videotaped. (Forgive me for not revving up the Google machine to find all of the examples, but you know what I’m talking about.) Another staple is the story about how people can’t escape their Google histories. Your “permanent record” was always a lot of hype – until now. Once your name is on the Interwebs, it’s there forever.
It occurs to me – and I might be completely wrong – that if this trend continues, we could see the return of something like Victorianism. Okay, maybe not Victorianism, but a kind of mercenary moral rearmament.
I’ve long liked the Victorian model, where everyone was expected to behave one way in public, but it was understood that some wild stuff might happen behind closed doors. One of the things that maintained public adherence to this moral standard was a powerful investment in one’s reputation. Another bulwark of social order was the fear that God was watching you. Those days are gone (which is not to say nobody is God-fearing anymore), but what seems to be emerging is something like a world where we try to maintain our e-reputations out of fear that everyone is watching us.
The downside of this theory is that what constitutes a good reputation, never mind shame, is changing rapidly. But that’s not a new story either, alas.
Oh, crap. I rambled on for a while there without actually getting to the point. I’m working on a larger project on these themes – or at least I’m thinking about it. If you have any good/intriguing/insightful examples of Nothing New Under the Sun-ism, shoot ‘em my way.
The Long Arm of O’Sullivan’s Law
Any good NR reader should know O’Sullivan’s Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” A reader sent me this link to a FrumForum piece lamenting that the site’s readership is moving farther left all the time.
Sons of Anarchy
It’s one of my favorite shows, and I’m going to try to write about it for the magazine. I got a review copy of the premiere episode of Season 3. It is awesome. That is all.
‘I Don’t Care’
If you haven’t seen this video, which became a web sensation a while back, you should watch it now (some profanity). The critter that says “I don’t care” has gotten under my skin. I can’t say “I don’t care” except in her voice. And I find myself seeing my daughter and dog as responding to me with “I don’t care” every time I talk to them.
Me: “You’ve already had dessert.”
Child: “I don’t care. I want ice cream.”
Me: “The cat is our pet too.”
Dog: “I don’t care. I want to kill it.”
And so on.
ICYMI Dept
The latest Ricochet podcast, with Rob Long, James Lileks, and moi. On iTunes or over at their shop. Oh, the Trek references.
My “official” reaction to the cover of Kos’s book, which is a pretty naked rip-off of mine.
No vocab this week, I’m at the beach.