Pink Air

Post punk

 

As a liberal, I can't help sympathizing with the underdog, so I was paradoxically cheered by David Brooks' heartfelt excavation and reinforcement of the conservative "way of living":

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft...Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

I wish this level of self-analysis carried more weight in American conservatism. Thirty months ago it might have given some positive direction to a Republican party thrashing around aimlessly in the wreckage of neoconservatism. Thirty years ago it might have been a center of intellectual gravity to pull the party from its death spiral into cynical, anti-government, wedge politics focused on winning rather than governing.

I thought I'd found another positive statement of modern conservative principle in Dinesh D'Souza's Letters to a Young Conservative, but yeesh. He starts off on the wrong foot with a superfluous description on page 2 of a hypothetical liberal protester as a "large, disheveled woman" who comes "rolling up the aisle shouting." Dude, seriously. Do you really not see what attitudes you've balled up into those few, unnecessary words? (Freudians, linguists, film theorists and other VLWC conspirators have advanced the idea that superfluous, seemingly unmotivated communication reveals a speaker's unstated and possibly repressed motivation. Which is exactly what you'd expect them to say.)

But most of D'Souza's shallowness lies conveniently on the surface. Gender wage discrepancies are easily explained ("among men, there are many more geniuses", btw) and we'd all be better off if women learned to value the private sphere more rather than compete with men in the public sphere. Oofda.

D'Souza was one of the whippersnappers associated with the Dartmouth Review, founded the same year I started college, and my opinion of them hasn't changed since then. They're punks. With the same truant bravado and desire to provoke and probably the same eventual collapse into a suicidal bloodbath of doctrinal purity. Whether the last ones in the clubhouse are screaming "No new taxes!" or "No new chords!", most members will gradually drift away to explore related but more complex alternatives. Which is what happens when your culture is founded on the comprehensive externalization of blame and you run out of things to blame.

Tony Wilson said, "Punk enabled you to say 'Fuck you', but somehow it couldn't go any further. Sooner or later someone was going to want to say, 'I'm fucked', and that was Joy Division." I can't wait to hear the Republican Joy Division.

Words matter

As a Social Studies major, I spent my sophomore year puzzling through The Great Men of European Social Theory: Marx, Weber, Durkheim. I don't think I ever really understood any of them, but I always had a thing for Weber. He seemed to be the most comfortable with messiness and uncertainty. My advisor probably explained my preference more eloquently when he summarized the difference between Marx and Weber in four words: "For Weber, words matter."

Pretended or not, Republican disdain for words has not served them well. I don't think it's just a case of "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"; that is, faced with an opponent of uncommon eloquence, they decided to equate fine speaking with elitism. For me, the Bush administration's epitaph was written four years ago by the anonymous presidential aide who famously expressed his bosses' contempt for "what we call the reality-based community." As it turns out, words and reality actually do have something to do with one another.

First, thoughtful speech tells you something about the qualities of the thoughts expressed. Clear, careful, confident words communicate that the speaker has thought through the reasons for and consequences of his propositions. Enough said on that point.

Second, and more relevant to my preference for Weber, words matter because as often as not, we act on the basis of words alone. Marxists (and many marketers) may believe that people are largely driven by hidden, underlying forces, material or unconscious, and that the words we use to explain our actions are no more than self-delusion. But that's just wrong. Words matter because expectations shape our behavior in a very concrete, reality-based way. Or to put it more eloquently, words matter because hope matters.