The American Conservative

Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln

This is an odd, rambling, not-altogether-coherent essay-review by Charles Fried on “Torture, America, and the Laws of War.” Fried is reviewing John Fabian Witt’s book Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which describes and analyzes the “code” for military behavior that President Lincoln authorized in 1863. Fried looks at this code in relation to the full history of American attitudes towards “chivalry” in war — or its absence.

It’s an interesting topic, no doubt, and one worth exploring. But I’m not going to explore it today. I’ve found myself thinking primarily about something Fried says near the beginning of his essay:

When I first read this enthralling and important book, I took it as an extended tribute to Lincoln’s moral genius. There is genius in many fields and on many dimensions. Moral genius, like political genius, is far closer to artistic genius than it is to genius in science or mathematics. It has to do with putting together familiar elements in unexpected ways, combining and recombining the materials to take account of and overcome the constraints of those materials, and finally coming up with a whole that surprises by its power, its aptness, and its sense that we are experiencing something fundamentally new. Relating moral genius to the genius of Keats or Raphael or Bach may seem to diminish the ultimate seriousness, the urgency of morality — or at least to make a category mistake that slights the special quality of each. But they do have things in common. In each case we cannot look at the world again in the same way after we have taken them in. Everything that has gone before and comes after takes on a different valence and hue. They change our world, they change our lives.

The concept of “moral genius” is to me a fascinating one. I think Fried is right in saying that the moral genius is not simply an innovator, but rather someone who can put “together familiar elements in unexpected ways, combining and recombining the materials to take account of and overcome the constraints of those materials.” That is, the moral genius works within a tradition of moral thought, but manifests brilliance by taking that tradition in new directions, in such a way that we can see that the tradition is not being rejected but fulfilled.

For a Christian such as myself, Jesus is the obviously ideal exemplar of moral genius, but the category would obviously apply to other founders of religious traditions: the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, etc. Below this obvious highest level, I wonder whom else we might identify as moral geniuses? The prophet Isaiah, certainly; St. Francis of Assisi; Maimonides; in a peculiar but important sense Montaigne.

Anyone care to nominate others? Remember, these need to be people who effect a major transformation in moral understanding and action — I’m not sure I agree with Fried that Lincoln qualifies, since it’s not clear to me that he had unique insights, a distinctive moral understanding lacking in other people of his time. In fact, I wonder whether a moral genius in the political sphere is even possible. Thoughts?

A young English poet named Christian Ward won a prize for his poem “The Deer at Exmoor.” The problem: he plagiarized it, copying much of it from a 2010 poem by Helen Mort called “The Deer.”

A commonplace event, but I’m interested in Ward’s explanation:

I was working on a poem about my childhood experiences in Exmoor and was careless. I used Helen Mort’s poem as a model for my own but rushed and ended up submitting a draft that wasn’t entirely my own work.

I had no intention of deliberately plagiarising her work. That is the truth.

I am sorry this has happened and am making amends. This incident is all my fault and I fully accept the consequences of my actions. I apologise to the Exmoor Society, Helen Mort, the poetry community and to the readers of the WMN.

Well, good for him for making a straightforward apology — but here we go with the “my notes were confused” excuse again. It seems to be the go-to excuse for plagiarists, who want us to believe that as a standard part of their research they write or type out other people’s writings word-for-word and then forget that they didn’t write those words.

So Ruth Shalit “blames her own sloppy computer habits–accidentally splicing together published stories with her own notes–for the previous incidents.” Doris Kearns Goodwin explains, “Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart’s work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not hers.” And Fareed Zakaria: “The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore’s article — he said he often writes his research in longhand.”

Every time I read an explanation like this, I think: That’s impossible. How could you not be able to tell your writing from someone else’s, even if your notes were sloppy? And then, after a moment, I think, That could never happen to me — could it? I feel sure it couldn’t. But then maybe some day I’ll discover that I’m wrong about that.

Still: accidental plagiarism of a poem? That one I’ll never be able to swallow.

“Now, let me tell you, son….”

Don’t you just have to love this? A post for the New Yorker about how people like, well, you know, people like George Packer, people who write for the New Yorker, have for several decades been culturally dominated by Southerners.

At the same time, the Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and NASCAR, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C. (despite its largesse). In 1978, the Dallas Cowboys laid claim to the title of “America’s team” — something the San Francisco 49ers never would have attempted. In Palo Alto, of all places, the cool way to express rebellion in your high-school yearbook was with a Confederate flag. That same year, the tax revolt began, in California.

The Southernization of American life was an expression of the great turn away from the centralized liberalism that had governed the country from the Presidencies of F.D.R. to Nixon.

Ah yes, the long insidious reach of the Confederacy! Let them Palo Alto young ‘uns flash the Stars and Bars and the next thing you know you got a tax revolt on your hands! All us crackers over here are snickerin’ behind our beards. We bided our time and got our revenge on them damn Yankees!

But, Packer says, our dominance has ended. Now, after their long absence, their agonizing exclusion from the leadership of our nation, their forcible exile from cultural influence, Northern liberals have returned to the forefront. (As their exemplar Mr. Burns says in the Simpsons movie, “For once, the rich white man is in control!”) And here’s the great thing about Northern liberals: they do not rejoice immoderately in their victory, no, they are willing to give us sage advice:

Southern political passions have always been rooted in sometimes extreme ideas of morality, which has meant, in recent years, abortion and school prayer. But there is a largely forgotten Southern history, beyond the well-known heroics of the civil-rights movement, of struggle against poverty and injustice, led by writers, preachers, farmers, rabble-rousers, and even politicians, speaking a rich language of indignation. The region is not entirely defined by Jim DeMint, Sam Walton, and the Tide’s A J McCarron. It would be better for America as well as for the South if Southerners rediscovered their hidden past and took up the painful task of refashioning an identity that no longer inspires their countrymen.

So the generous recommendation of the Northern liberal is that Southerners can make up for their decades of cruel domination of American life by becoming . . . Southern liberals. Well, slap my grandmammy down!

the cast of Girls

Nathan Heller’s New Yorker essay on young urban people is called “Semi-Charmed Life,” and the subtitle (undoubtedly provided by his editors) is “The twentysomethings are all right.” But is that what the essay says? Here’s how it concludes:

Twentysomething culture is intimate and exclusive on the one hand, and eternal on the other. We tout this stage of life, in retrospect, as free, although we ogle the far shores of adulthood while we’re there. Sometimes those two illusions of the age converge: Nielsen data indicate that the most enthusiastic audience for “Girls” is middle-aged men.

The shock of the twenties is how narrow that window of experience really is, and how inevitable it seems both at the time and afterward. At some point, it is late, too late, and you are standing on the sidewalk outside somewhere very loud. A wind is blowing. It’s the same cool, restless late-night breeze that blew on trampled nineteen-twenties lawns, dazed sixties streets, and anywhere young people gather. Nearby, someone who doesn’t smoke is smoking. An attractive stranger with a lightning laugh jaywalks between cars with a friend, making eye contact before scurrying inside. You’re far from home. It’s quiet. All at once, you have a thrilling sense of nowness, of the sheer potential of a verdant night with all these unmet people in it. For a long time after that, you think you’ll never lose this life, those dreams. But that was, as they say, then.

Heller is obviously going for an evocative ending rather than a conclusion per se — but what is he trying to evoke? Perhaps a sense that unmarried, urban, and financially relatively secure twentysomethings have that the life they’re living won’t last long. But that doesn’t answer any of the questions the essay raises about whether those people are living well.

But maybe that’s because “living well” is not a category Heller has available to him. He meanders from issue to issue, topic to topic, doing little more than listing the various sources of youthful anxiety. Will I find a mate? Will I “fall behind” others of my cohort in wage-earning? (That seems to be a big one, perhaps because that’s the only easily measurable way I can compare myself to others.) Are the political commitments of my generation just borrowed from earlier young cultures?

But Heller never seems to get around to asking what seem to me obvious questions about what ways of life make it worth living, what sorts of acts and orientations help bring about eudaimonia, human flourishing. I get the sense that he’s not even aware that those are questions one might ask.

It’s often said that the current generation of twentysomethings are distinctively narcissistic, but the available evidence strongly suggests that that is not true: any narcissism that has set in to American society set in forty or more years ago, just as Christopher Lasch told us. But if they’re not any more narcissistic than their predecessors, these young people do often seem bereft of a moral vocabulary with which to assess their lives — and, perhaps equally often, they seem to be craving such a vocabulary. For that lack they have no one but their elders to blame.

a ‘livingskin’ prosthetic hand made by Touch Bionics. Photo courtesy Touch Bionics

I encourage you all to read this really thoughtful essay by Steven Poole on the increasing varieties of “human enhancement.” Two points strike me as being particularly important.

The first is the disturbing extent to which proponents of what they believe to be human enhancement despise embodied life:

As the inventor Ray Kurzweil (who popularised the idea of the singularity) put it, there is no reason to fear the arrival of malign super-intelligent machines, because: ‘It will not be a matter of us versus them. We will become the machines.’

For some, perhaps, this is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But it also reveals the essentially religious nature of much singularity-style techno-futurism: such visions constitute an eschatology in which human beings finally sublime into the cybersphere. It is the silicon Rapture — and this reminds us that ‘to enhance’ once meant literally ‘to raise up’. This desire to become machinic implicitly betrays a hatred of the flesh as severe as that of self-flagellating religious ascetics. For the devout of singularity theory, the perfection of humanity is synonymous with its destruction.

It is a whole vision of perfected humanity based on the belief that the organic is intrinsically inferior to the inorganic.

The second key point is this:

Some thinkers argue that there is actually a moral obligation on us to enhance ourselves by any means necessary. For example, Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, argues in the Superhuman catalogue that we are ethically obliged to pursue research into ‘moral enhancement’ drugs. ‘The threat to our survival,’ he writes, comes mainly ‘from the choices that we make through religious fundamentalism or excessive consumption of our resources and our climate, through our failure to bring about global equality and global justice.’ Therefore we are obliged to make ourselves nicer. ‘Unless you believe that evolution provided just the perfect number of psychopaths in our community and just the right level of selfishness within different individuals, you should believe that we should change that natural distribution for the better and use science to do that.’

This sounds splendid, until one wonders how we are all to agree on what exactly the morally ideal kind of mind is before we impose it neurochemically on others, assuming that ever becomes possible. Savulescu accepts that there will be ‘those who are sceptical about making humans morally better’, but argues that ‘at the very least we should try to reduce the distorting influences and also the natural inequality in moral capacities that already exists’.

People only ever make the kind of argument that Savulescu makes here when they believe that they, or people just like them, will be the ones making decisions about what counts as “enhancement.” Savulescu assumes without question that “we” know what is best and “we” will always be in charge. Oh Orwell, Huxley, and Burgess — you wrote in vain.

There are a few things I don’t understand about this Susan Jacoby essay on “The Blessings of Atheism”. Jacoby writes,

It is primarily in the face of suffering, whether the tragedy is individual or collective, that I am forcefully reminded of what atheism has to offer. When I try to help a loved one losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.

It is a positive blessing, not a negation of belief, to be free of what is known as the theodicy problem. Human “free will” is Western monotheism’s answer to the question of why God does not use his power to prevent the slaughter of innocents, and many people throughout history (some murdered as heretics) have not been able to let God off the hook in that fashion.

I can certainly see how it could be a relief not to think about how to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton put it. But how is this connected to “what atheism has to offer”? What does atheism have to offer when “a loved one [is] losing his mind to Alzheimer’s,” and so on? I don’t see how atheism qua atheism (as the philosophers say) has anything at all to offer, though particular atheists, just like particular religious believers, can certainly offer a lot in the way of care, compassion, physical and emotional assistance.

Jacoby seems to be saying that atheism can have a role in an atheist’s life that’s similar to the role religion has in the life of a religious person, but I can’t see how that could be so. A religious person might say,“I help those who suffer because I believe that God wants me to do that,” but I don’t imagine that an atheist says that helps those who suffer just because she is an atheist.

Atheism is a metaphysical stance with no obvious ethical entailments. “There is no God and therefore I should be compassionate” is a syllogism with evident missing parts. If you don’t believe in a loving God who wants us also to be loving, any compassion you demonstrate doesn’t derive from your not believing something, but from your believing something about what human beings owe to one another. (I have known compassionate atheists, but their compassion derived from those positive beliefs that they would have shared with some but not all of their fellow atheists.) So when Jacoby writes, “We need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect,” this strikes me as a nonsensical statement. How can atheism be “rooted in empathy”? “I empathize with others and therefore I don’t believe that God exists”?

One more question:

Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

I don’t know what it might mean to “deny religious believers the comfort of their faith.” Presumably few atheists would want to reach into the minds of other people and snatch their comforts out — though maybe some would — but certainly to be an atheist is necessarily to believe that the comforts of religious faith are false comforts. And, on the other side, what counts as “respect” for atheist’s “deeply held conviction” about the absence of an afterlife? No matter how deeply an atheist might hold that conviction, I don’t agree with it: is that disrespectful?

In short: I can’t make sense of this essay. Can anyone offer some clarification?

(And nota bene: if you want your comment posted you should really try to answer my questions, or explain civilly what’s wrong with them, not fight the Wars of Religion all over again.)

I usually keep a record of the books I read each year, but I’m thinking that this year I won’t. Lists are funny things: they have real effects on human behavior. (Umberto Eco thinks they are ways of — mentally — staving off death.) It’s very satisfying to cross items off to-do lists, and to add items to lists of accomplishments. Maybe too satisfying, because over the years I’ve read some things I didn’t really want to read just because I liked the thought of adding something to my “books read” list.

Recently it has occurred to me that if those lists have encouraged me to read some things, they may have discouraged me from reading others. In particular, while I love poetry, essays, and short stories, I suspect that I tend to read less in those genres than I would if I weren’t keeping track.

So I decree that this year will be the Year of Small Genres, AKA the Year of No List. I want to read (or in some cases re-read) stories by Chekhov, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Lydia Davis; essays by Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Scott Sanders; poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Wisława Szymborska, Scott Cairns, Linda Gregerson. And whatever else comes to mind, including book-length works if I have the inclination. But no lists.

Maybe it’s the return of Downton Abbey that has me following this little trail of memory….

In 1990, when I was leading a summer study tour in England, I visited Penshurst Place in Kent for the first time. Our coach driver grumbled a bit at having to take us so far off the beaten path, on narrow roads clearly not meant for modern motor-coaches, but I was excited to see the place. It was the ancestral home of the Sidney family — the great Renaissance poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney was born there — and had eventually passed to another branch of the family, the Shelleys — yes, as in the poet, though unlike Sidney, Percy Shelley never lived there. The place held a good deal of literary romance for me.

Among English country houses it’s not one of the biggest: when in the seventeenth century Ben Jonson wrote his famous poem about it, he noted that it was not built to overawe; rather, it was to be celebrated for its history, its graceful proportions, and the beauty of its setting. But it’s big enough, with its old Great Hall at the center.

And its gardens are exceptionally beautiful and varied in their styles.

Having toured the house, on an utterly perfect summer day, I was standing on the lawn looking out over the gardens when I was approached by an elderly couple. The lady was small and wiry, dressed in elegant pastels; the man short, stout, and wearing what was obviously a very expensive black pinstriped suit. “I understand you are leading this group,” the man said. I agreed that this was the case. “This is my house,” he said.

The man who had approached me was William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L’Isle and fifteenth Governor-General of Australia, and it was indeed his house. He had a spot of food on his lapel; he and Lady L’Isle has apparently just finished lunch in one of the newer wings of the house, not open to visitors, and for some reason had decided to check out the visitors.

I tried to remember how, precisely, one should address a Viscount — “My Lord”? Was that too much? Was it inappropriate for an American to say? — and not being able to decide, merely inclined my head in a manner that I hoped would appear respectful but not servile.

“Tell me,” he said, in a gruff voice but with the expected plummy accent, “Why did you choose to come to Penshurst? There are many country houses you might have visited. Why did you come here?”

I began by explaining that we were on a literary tour, so the associations with Sidney were especially important, but went on to say that the house and grounds were even more beautiful than I had imagined they would be. The Viscount smiled at this, and said, “Yes, yes, yes.”

Then he paused for a moment, thinking, and said, “Of course, if the Communists had their way there wouldn’t be any houses like this.” I agreed that this was so. But then — remember, this was 1990 — he beamed and exclaimed, “But I’ll bet we’ve seen the last of them!” I agreed, and expressed my fervent hope that this was so, which pleased him.

The Viscount and his lady looked at me, apparently expecting a little more, so I praised the house in more detail. I commented that Ben Jonson was right to celebrate it for its modesty, and quoted the first lines of “To Penshurst”:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,

Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row

Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,

Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,

And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.

At this the Viscount beamed still more, and Lady L’Isle spoke for the first time: “Goodness,” she fluted, “these are learned people!”

This guy has a great hobby:

A smartphone shows the first twitter message of Pope Benedict XVI, in Rome on December 12, 2012. Italian Tommasso Debenedetti has killed many world luminaries, including the Pope, in fake tweets aimed at exposing shoddy journalism, earning him global notoriety.

Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope Benedict XVI—Italian Tommasso Debenedetti has killed them all in fake tweets aimed at exposing shoddy journalism that have earned him global notoriety.

The latest victim of Debenedetti’s unusual hobby is British author JK Rowling, whose death in an accident he announced from a fake Twitter account purporting to belong to fellow writer John Le Carre.

“Death works well on Twitter,” Debenedetti, who is in his 40s and says he teaches literature at a school in Rome, told AFP in a phone interview. Debenedetti said that when he saw his Le Carre account had 2,500 followers including journalists from major British, German and US media, “I decided to make John Le Carre say JK Rowling had died”. Debenedetti said the tweet was then retweeted hundreds of times and a Chilean television station even gave the false news as fact.

Exciting possibilities suggest themeslves. But do stories other than deaths get retweeted? To find out, I am going to start a Twitter account under the name “Pat Buchanan” just to announce that Rod Dreher has left his wife and run off to Rio de Janeiro with Edwin Edwards, where the happy couple will be stars of a reality TV show (to be dubbed into Portuguese). Watch this space to see what happens.

Among sportscasters, verbal tics are highly contagious: a quirk of phrasing that begins with a single person quickly spreads to the whole profession. This is usually not a good development. I particularly despise a set of phrases that have become ubiquitous in the past few years: “Oh, he’s gotta make that catch.” — or that throw, or that shot.

To which I always reply, “Evidently not.”

Or, reversing the polarity, the commentator exclaims, “He can’t make that throw in that situation” or “He just can’t miss from there.” To which I reply, “Evidently he can.”

This kind of thing is non-commentary, utterly useless verbiage, the apotheosis of linguistic emptiness. But it’s impossible to get through a sporting event without hearing something of the kind. So, commentators: You can’t use those lame locutions. You’ve just gotta do better.