I want to point to dizziest of the dizzying heights of blog self-importance:
More Praise [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
And the Blog said, "I am that I am."
And the Blog looked upon itself and declared, "I am good."
This posts marks the end of the experiment which no doubt left my RSS-only readers questioning my sanity. It had been called:
But now it is done.
I think S-Gold has nailed it for the most part, but I would add that it is our uniquely great perspectives which make our perspectives uniquely great. Not just anyone could write what we write every day and be as incisive as we are.
I've thought over this very seriously and thoughtfully—as very seriously and thoughtfully as I seriously and thoughtfully thought about my detailed and careful argument—and I think it's our unique greatness that makes The Cornered uniquely great.
I'm still thinking about it. I've come up with a few things, but I need to think about it more. How do we come up with such great material all the time? This one is tough.
S-Lop, there's no easy answer to the question of how we think these great thoughts in words at what must be alarming frequency. I chalk it up to the unique greatness of the group we have Cornered here. But that's not what you want to know. I'll have to think about this for a while.
An email:
How do you Cornered folk write so much? How do you make it of such high quality? I know it must take real hard disciplined work to type all those letters to go along with your great thoughts and I wonder how you manage to do it.
I don't want to sound immodest, so maybe the rest of The Cornered could answer this great question?
If you want to know what goes on in college literature classes, look no further than this indecent award-winning piece of fiction:
Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.
These micturient professors push their excretal literatures on our children and what do we do? We reward them. Ward Churchill!
Ward Churchill Ward Churchill Ward Churchill!
No, I don't have anything much to show yet for my coding efforts. I'm working mostly offline, just uploading stuff to subdirectories when I want to check out my new host's FTP facility.
My aim is to get myself out from under the rotting hulk of MS Frontpage by Jan 1st 2008, and have a spiffy new website up and running for the new year. It will include audio, video, interactive stuff, and—if I can track down the necessary add-ons—smell-o-vision.
Who would not want to countenance the smell of my countenance:
I'm having wonderful fun coding XHTML/CSS. Forgotten what it's like to be in the zone. Getting obsessively absorbed in teeny little problems—currently, why IE7 (which is usually the cranky browser) will cope with the "list-style-image" property but Firefox apparently won't.
Some may say I should be this obsessively absorbed about the books and columns I write but they are all bores. I like to save myself for important matters.
Incidentally: do you like my cute little "S-Derb" icon. Check it out. Can you patent a favicon? I live in fear that there might be another S-Derb out there.
S-Pod, didn't someone once favorably compare The New York Post to Dickens because they were both so popular? So we can say liberal cultural elitists champion Dickens but not the Dickens of today? I think Bill Bennett would agree.
A quick story: I had run into him a month or so ago with a friend in Washington. That night, said friend mentioned at her family dinner table that she had met Bill Bennett during the day. One of her children responded: "Oh I know him, he wrote The Book of Virtues." Another of her children interrupted: "No, silly, he was drug czar." No, the third, protested, "Bill Bennett was education secretary."
That may be an "only in D.C." dinner-table conversation. But it’s also a great tribute. Between the work he’s done on so many fronts and his wife's important work with inner-city girls and boys–he surely deserves a few moments of pride today—and a birthday greetings bottle of wine. He's a great example of someone who’s made an imprint on our political and cultural life in so many different ways—you could call him The New York Post of people.
The passing of the film director Ingmar Bergman is already leading to tributes not only to his supposed greatness—one critic today calls him "the greatest artist of the 20th century"—but also to the nobility of his efforts to grapple with the most painful aspects of the human condition. I call these judgments into question in this column. I may be ignorant of film and literary and cultural history, but my evaluation of Bergman's bummer movies should be considered with all the gravity due a column in The New York Post.
Should we abolish tenure? Yes. Think about Ward Churchill. It may be a pie in the sky, but there are real possibilities for change. Remember Ward Churchill. The answer, I think, is state legislatures. What we need is a campaign to remind conservative-leaning legislatures of Ward Churchill. The mere existence of such a campaign would provoke intense professorial reaction, thereby sparking a national debate. Can you imagine college professors on TV trying to seriously defend the idea that tenure has functioned to protect the market place of ideas in light of Ward Churchill?
Tenure is the cornerstone of the campus political-correctness problem and Ward Churchill. The time to consider a serious campaign to eliminate academic tenure has come with Ward Churchill. I guarantee you, even the slightest prospect of change (i.e. one state legislature seriously debating the end of tenure in its public university system) would send the professorate into a mad rage, and would provoke a major national debate about Ward Churchill.
I think a serious Ward Churchill campaign could have real success.
S-Gold, I suppose I don’t completely agree with your point about social Darwinism—though given the expertise you’ve no doubt built up in writing your book I state my view with trepidation. There is of course an element of malicious fun in referring to the old progressives as social Darwinists, but there’s also truth in it. It’s certainly true the term was brought into wide use in America (only in the late 1940s, I believe, by Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought) in an effort to describe attitudes that idolized competition, which he took to be mostly capitalist attitudes. But social Darwinism has also been used to describe the applications of scientific (or really in most cases “scientific”) thinking to questions of population and race in ways that make a case for public policy grounded in a preference for the strong over the weak—be it the physically strong or the socially strong—but not necessarily for free competition as the organizing principle of society. This is closer to the original use of the term, in the late 19th century. This kind of social Darwinism draws more on Malthus (who preceded Darwin) and Galton than on Darwin himself, and it surely informed the early eugenicists, and many people who argued (on various sides of the politics of those days) about the strength of the species rather than the well-being of the individual. There were many important progressives in that category.
Your term "reform Darwinism" is very helpful in clarifying the distinctions between these two quite different approaches. The laissez-faire social Darwinists opposed social reform as pointless and counter-productive, arguing that the problem was inherent in those who are weak and so could not be fixed by progressive reforms. But I wonder if "reform Darwinism" would not describe a sub-category of the social Darwinists, rather than a view to be contrasted with social Darwinism.
This way we could call them the Nazis. I still have not done the research, and I still will never bother to, but this seems to me a much more accurate assessment of liberal policy.
S-Lo, I doubt he meant that. No doubt he was thinking very seriously and thoughtfully about his argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care. He must have meant "liberals" or "Nazis." I suppose we'll find out on the weekly audio Radio S-Derb audio weekly wrap-up.
I was reading a website when I found this painting. It is an acute psychological study titled "The Many Faces of Hillary":
It almost makes me want to appreciate art. We just need to update it with Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kim Jong-Il, Castro, Chavez...
S-Gold, you didn't mean to call our philosophy despicable, did you? Maybe you can clarify on the weekly Radio S-Derb audio wrap-up?
A reader writes:
That last post you wrote on social Darwinism didn't make any sense. Do you mean to say we can't call the left social Darwinists because they already call us that for being neo-liberal and laissez-faire and we don't want to associate laissez-faire practices with Nazism?
Sigh. Let me explain this again: the left calls the laissez-faire philosophy "social Darwinism." But both the left and right consider social Darwinism (and Herbert Spencer, who I discuss briefly, based on someone else's work, in my very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care) the root of Nazism. So we can't call Hillary a "social Darwinist" without reminding the left of who the real social Darwinists were then (Nazis) and now (us). If the left mistakes their despicable philosophy for ours, we're going to have a hard time getting Bush elected again.
S-Vin, I guess I'd disagree with you that the progressives were social Darwinists. That's a term largely invented or popularized by the left (like neocon and Robber Baron) to describe the "bad guys." The progressives were indeed raging Darwinists, but they were, in the useful but largely forgotten phrase of Eric Goldman, "reform Darwinists." Social Darwinism was a term of scorn for laissez-faire liberals (like Herbert Spencer), which is the last thing progressives were. It's also why using the phrase "social Darwinism" to describe Nazism is so unhelpful. Unless, of course, one wants to say that the Nazis were laissez-faire.
And trust me they weren't. I know all about Spencer because a while back I asked for some Spencer experts to tell me what I needed to know about him for a few pages of my very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care. So when I say that Herbert Spencer was a Darwinist, even a "social Darwinist" in the way the Progressives meant the term, i.e. he was a radical libertarian or a "liberal."
In the 20th century, without heed to the arguments they made in the 19th century, the left used the phrase social Darwinism to describe Hitlerite eugenics, and to make Herbert Spencer an intellectual grandfather of Nazism. Even though before the war such eugenics were almost solely the balliwick of the left and Herbert Spencer was almost the diametrical opposite of a Nazi. Regardless, the label stuck on Nazism too. The result has been a term which means both Nazi-like governmental intrusions into society and libertarian-style governmental withdrawals from society. In other words, anything the left doesn't like can be call "social Darwinism" without penalty.
That's why the association between dehumanizing Nazi practices and dehumanizing laissez-faire practices can't both be called "social Darwinism." I support one but not the other. We don't want to allow leftists to call us "Nazis" just because we don't value human life.
Ross Douthat notes Hillary Clinton's preference for the label "progressive" over "liberal" and wonders if this goes beyond mere questions of branding to serious changes on the left that should worry us.
Progressivism, after all, has a very mixed history in American politics, which takes in not only efforts to reform labor laws, bust trusts, and create national parks but also some serious doses of racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and a very strange mix of authoritarianism and out of control populism (a point well made by Marty Peretz recently as well). Ross suggests it is no coincidence that the growing preference for the term "progressive" comes at a time when a new eugenics is rearing its head, and when the left is increasingly emphasizing its self-identification as the party of science (a notion some of whose peculiarities and ironies I noted here a while back.)
Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about—I have not done the research myself and will not bother to—but I think it is obvious that the racist elements of contemporary progressivism can be traced back to social Darwinism and the establishment of the national parks by progressives.
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