Questions and Answers

Please excuse me, this is a bit of a personal musing, or perhaps navel gazing.

It's been 5 years since I graduated from St. John's college.  I arrived there a pretty doctrinaire 18 year old who thought he had all the answers, and I left at 22 being somewhat less sure of myself, or at least less settled in my ideals.  Even if I didn't learn humility (it will take more than a college to teach me that, I think) I learned that I couldn't, personally, find the answer to everything.

In between those two points I was surrounded by questions.  "Can virtue be taught?"  "Does Anselm Prove that there is a God?"  were some specific ones.  Behind them were more general questions 'What is the right way to live our lives?' 'How do we know what we know' and other such things.  With a few exceptions -- does Anselm prove that there's a God?  No.  -- these questions were not answered.  Questions like that are odd because people ask them earnestly, and yet, if you ask the asker, they will be forced to admit that they don't expect to find an answer.

What is the point of a question that has no answer?  When I was at college people spoke of 'loving the questions' and some authors (such as Heidegger) seemed to assume that asking them was the only point.  But language is a set of tools, and a question is a tool get an answer.  If a question cannot be answered, isn't it a defective tool, or a tool being misused?

Returning on a Philosophical Note - A Principled Critique of Libertarianism

Blogging has not happened here for a while, due mostly to a certain seasonal torpor on the part of the bloggers.  But we're back now, and aim to update a bit more regularly.

We return with a critique of libertarianism.  Libertarianism is generally seen as a consistent, principled ideology, and gains respectability with white-collar professional types (and the media that caters to them) because its so supposedly philosophically sound.*  Critiques of libertarianism often take its philosophical soundness for granted or refuse to dispute it, and rely instead on practical arguments about the consequences of libertarian policies for poor people, the environment and the rights of minorities.**

These are good arguments, and I have made them before, but I wanted to critique libertarianism on a more fundamental level and argue that its consistency is not the result of sober thought, but of a glib desire to reduce all politics to a single goal -- maximizing liberty. 

To do this I will not look at the world through a theoretical lens, but looking at the world as it exists.

State Songs

State songs. Who cares about them? No one, and for good reason: most of them are awful - racist and tacky, full of purple prose and bad rhyme schemes talking about how great said state is, and set to unremarkable Victorian tunes. They'll only be sung at really important ceremonial occasions, and these happen infrequently enough that by the time state officials realize they have to sing the state song again it's too late to go to the legislature and try to get a new one. Fortunately, most people will live their entire lives without hearing their state song.

For all that they're terrible, though, state songs are one of the richest sources of nerdy history humor imaginable.

The State of the GOP Part II: 'Economic Conservatives' are the Problem

There is a trope in educated, white-collar circles that the trouble with the GOP is the fundies -- that the GOP is too tied to white evangelicals and conservative catholics, and that this is what makes the GOP so crazy.  We're going to hear more of this after the recent election, after Akin and Mourdock happened to frame pro-life orthodoxy in a truthful but unflattering way, and lost their senate races in the process.  After episodes like this, we are bound to hear that the GOP's problem is inflexible social conservatism and too much religion.  And those things are not good, probably not for the GOP and certainly not for our nation.  But this narrative of the perfidious fundy highjacking the high-minded conservative movement is untrue on a number of levels, starting with simple chronology.

The State of the GOP part I: We Already Know What a Hispanic - Friendly GOP Looks Like

After being trounced in the 2012 election*, the commentators and GOP politicians and operatives immediately began talking about how they can avoid a route like this in the future.  Their conversation has centered around winning back Hispanics, who decisively supported Obama over Romney, and have moved in a decisively more Democratic direction over the past two elections, while at the same time making up a bigger portion of the electorate, according to the Pew Hispanic center:

The most commonly cited issue is comprehensive immigration reform; Republicans of various stripes now seem to think that this is a very important issue, and their change in tone is understandable.  But the fact of the matter is that the Republican partiy already has a very good blueprint for appealing to Hispanics:  George W. Bush.  They are also unlkely to follow this blueprint.

A Presidential Endorsement of Little Consequence

The editors of this blog hereby endorse Barack H. Obama for reelection to the presidency.  We think he's played his hand very well after being given the worst deal since (at least) Jimmy Carter.  He has passed a landmark health care law, strengthened environmental regulation in some key regards (if not nearly enough) and has successfully extricated the US from Iraq.  Oh, and SEAL Team 6 killed Bin Laden on his orders.

Less substantially, we like the cut of his jib.  He seems to approach the world with a genuine curiosity, which is exactly what our nation needs after the epistemic closure of the Bush years.  Personally, I like having a guy in the Oval Office who wrote his college girlfriends embarrassingly pretensious analyses of TS Eliot (it's nice to know I wasn't the only one) -- it's the liberal art's majors equivalent of being a President you can have a beer with.

But stepping aside from the formalities that's not what most interests me.  The question is, when I live in a safe state for Obama, why vote for him and not a protest candidate, if only to apply pressure on the president on issues like the Environment, Civil Liberties and Drone Strikes?

The fact of the matter is that I disagree more with Gary Johnson and Jill Stein than with Obama.  Unlike Johnson, I don't think that we should eliminate a vast laundry list of cabinet departments and shrink the budget to pre-depression levels.   Unlike Johnson, I don't think that 2 or 3 percent inflation is to be feared, or that hyperinflation is just around the corner, so unlike Johnson, I don't favor a restrictive monetary policy that would risk deflation and strangle our country's fragile recovery.  Unlike Stein, I don't think that we should implement a command economy that would guarantee full employment, or government banks.  So it just doesn't make sense to me to vote for someone with home I have -less- common ground, who isn't even going to win anyway.

For me, and for someone of my beliefs (in short, a free market and government strong enough to offset or check its excesses) Obama is not the lesser evil.  He's pretty damn good.

The Luck of Captain Wentworth: Naval Notes on Jane Austen's Persuasion

I'm re-reading Persuasion by Jane Austen.  I suppose I don't count as a true Austen fan, having read only two of her novels (Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice) but I loved Persuasion the first time I read it and I'm liking it even more this time around.

In a later post I will address the novel's themes and characters and compare them to those in Pride and Prejudice.  For the time being I will use the historical record to evaluate Lady Russell's near-fatal judgment of Captain Wentworth's career prospects, which occurred six years before the novel begins.

As a preface, Jane Austen was well acquainted with the Navy and its officers.  Two of her brothers were post captains who rose to become admiral after her death, and the description of naval occurrences, though not in the foreground, is done carefully by someone who knows what she's talking about.

Captain Wentworth was not born at a lucky time or at least, he didn't advance in his career at a lucky time.  The best years for navy men were the early years of the revolutionary wars, the 1790's, when British dominance on the sea was less secure and there were ample prospects for distinguishing oneself in action and gaining a fortune in prize money (Austen's older brother Francis was made lieutenant in 1792, just as war was declared, and rose to become Admiral of the Fleet).  Captain Wentworth was not a Captain in those 'lucky' years before Trafalgar, and was probably not a lieutenant for most of them.  In 1806 he was a Master and Commander, an officer qualified to command small 'unrated' naval vessels such as sloops of war.  He was promoted due to his role in the British Victory off Santo Domingo earlier that year.  This victory was the last time British ships of the line met French ships of the line in a fleet action in open water.  After Santo Domingo, the bulk of the French navy remained bottled up in Brest, Toulon and other ports, blockaded by British squadrons.  While this was good for Britain it was bad for the careers of her sailors, who now had extremely limited opportunities to distinguish themselves.

The Battle of Santo Domingo by the great sailor/artist Nicholas Pocock.  In the foreground the British Northumberland (74, right) engages the French Imperial (120!, left).  The Imperial was driven aground and later burned.