So check it out! And update your bookmarks, blogrolls, RSS readers, etc! The new domain is:

http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/

And the new posts feed is here, and the comments RSS here. No doubt there are still a few wrinkles to iron out, but we are … live.

… we’ll soon be welcoming John Schwenkler and J.L. Wall’s highly regarded “Upturned Earth,” the first of several upcoming additions.

Well. I just thought I’d note that, yes, this is for real – there are still a few little things to iron out, but the switch should be completed very soon. Many thanks to all of you for, uh, regarding us so highly. (Or not.) Stay tuned for the details, and here’s to the future …

Oh, and check out the redesigned main page, now crawling with enough uncompromised conservatism to make you wish it could come each week!

* Possible theories: Leftie postal employees trying to mess with us; crypto-conservative postal employees unable to resist a good read; tired carrier pigeons dozing off somewhere over the Great Plains; a city that prides itself on similarities to Western European economics ending up with postal workers with French-style work ethic. Further guesses, especially at the expense of the French worker, are always welcome.

… of course libertarian orthodoxy really does render most libertarians unwitting shills for corporate interests. Although also unintentionally so, the mainstream libertarian agenda is in effect largely a sop to corporate interests. If you could wave a magic wand and enact your average libertarian’s economic agenda, our corporate leaders would fall into a joy-induced stupor. The libertarian economic agenda, to a great degree, just is the corporate economic agenda.

There are times when Freddie can be a quite incisive observer, but this is decidedly not one of those. Indeed, as my friend Tim Carney has recently observed, the most libertarian members of Congress are actually among its least “business-friendly”, for the simple reason that they’re staunchly opposed to the kinds of taxpayer-sponsored corporate giveaways that make up approximately 95% of the daily business of Washington. The libertarian economic agenda includes neither bailouts nor handouts nor bizarro tax loopholes nor unnecessary wars and the associated channeling of billions of dollars and loads of influence into the hands of defense contractors. In a perfectly libertarian world there would be no regulatory creep for the simple reason that there would be very little regulation to speak of; no influence-peddling due to the government’s lack of, well, influence; no such thing as being too big to fail or too small to cut through the red tape; no more billions channeled to Midwestern farmers to produce wasteful and unnecessary corn ethanol; and so on. To me at least, this sounds very little like the sort of thing that sends corporatists into joy-induced stupors.

Now we can, of course, read Freddie’s words with an emphasis on “unwitting” and “unintentional”; he’s not really saying that libertarians are evil, but only that they’re a bit daft. And in fact I think there’s quite a lot to the observation that on the ground, the aspects of the libertarian political agenda that have the greatest political traction are the ones that are likely to get big-time corporate funding. But the problem with this criticism is that the same is true of everyone in politics; if libertarians are accidental shills for corporate elites, then by the same token liberals like Freddie are just a bunch of unknowing tools in the hands of unions, trial lawyers, energy interests salivating over the prospect of cap-and-trade, and dozens of other powerful lobbies besides. And many of those lobbies are – get this! – representatives of those dread “corporate interests”, aiming to use the liberal agenda as a means to tilt the economic playing field by regulating their competitors into oblivion, protect their backsides when things go wrong, siphon billions away from the government in the alleged service of “green” ends, and so on. Everyone gets played in this game, and so telling a realistic story about the politics of libertarians or conservatives means telling the same sort of story about those of standard-issue liberals. The idea that it’s the libertarians, of all people, who are insufficiently sensitive to “the banal truth of the everyday corruption of human power politics” is silly beyond belief.

Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

While I like being able to rattle off statistics about baseball teams that played before I was born, maybe it is a better thing that I can’t do that for any team since the entry into my life of, well, the internet – more space for other things. I’m not quite as concerned about this in terms of statistics and data as I am with – what did you expect? – the experience of story and literature.

The experience, yes – even after the fact, even while merely remembering the encounter. Literature, story, poetry – whatever you choose to call it/them – are (or ought to be) experientially timeless. To have listened to Homer recited as he must once have been, to give oneself wholly to the music of an orchestra, to sit reading Keats (silently or aloud), to immerse oneself in say, the worlds of Dostoevsky (or even, I’d say, of a Clancy or Crichton – as far as this particular point is concerned, there is no necessary limit to “high” literature) is to experience time in a way removed from that of our day-to-day lives. When we say that we “lose ourselves” in a book, or a piece of music, or a work of art, this, partly, is what we mean – it is what has occurred when, reading, one looks up and suddenly realizes – realizes! – that one is, in fact, sitting on the living room sofa, holding a book in their hands.

But the experience and the meaning cannot be divorced, at least not wholly. We cannot, as Virginia Woolf declared, ever truly and fully know the Greeks because we cannot know what we have to know them through – their poetry, their music, their performance – as they knew them.

There are two ways to encounter a work: directly, in that initial experience of reading or listening or observing; and later, indirectly, through memory and consideration and reflection. To learn from a work – for a work to affect you and for you to be affected by the work – both are necessary. Somehow, it is less the direct than the indirect that I would say is at risk of being lost on account of the Googlized index-memory – though the encounter, too is certainly threatened by the fact that we are now (or so we’re told, and have witnessed) increasingly likely to index rather than remember. It becomes harder to achieve that atemporality of the encounter with art if our attention spans are severed and shortened. Giving oneself over to a work is, in its own way, a skill, and must be practiced and honed to be kept sharp. If I go too long without reading a long piece – especially a work of fiction – it can take me several days to remember how to (this is one of the reasons why I’ve forced myself to carve out time to read something as often as possible that has nothing to do with school, and nothing to do with the world of the internet).

But my concern is more for the indirect, as I said earlier. That is, for the memory, the recollection, the other angle(s) from which one looks at something in order to see what is there. For example: the difference between thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand knowing that it contains the death of Hektor, and thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand recalling the death of Hektor. Or, to zoom out, of thinking of the Iliadand knowing only: Akhilles, Hektor, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris, war, fate, glory; or thinking of the Iliad and seeing all of those (and more), but in (something of, at least) the complex web of their relationships and interactions in all its glory.

The knowing – the memory – of a work is not re-experiencing the encounter. The encounter is outside of time; the memory places it within time and so is able to examine it. The index has two dimensions to the memory’s three: when you hold it up and tilt it, you may still be able to notice something new in the way the light hits it, but it becomes far more difficult.

There is good and bad in the way that Google (to use it as shorthand for all that is new) makes us think differently – the access to information that we otherwise might not have been able to remember is certainly good, as is the freedom to spend more time on those things which are of greater importance to ourselves. But the danger is in the loss of depth of consideration: of Buber’s Du; of the delight of Oakeshott’s Poetical Mode; of Heschel’s allusive timelessness.

Obviously, intent matters. If someone is attacking people of a particular religious, ethnic or sexual orientation in an effort to harass, provoke or intimidate members of said group, it may be a good idea to assess additional punishment, particularly if a history of animosity and violence is involved. There may be practical reasons not to take this approach – federalizing enforcement is frequently ineffective; racial and religious animosity has subsided in recent decades – but it seems to me that special conditions can justify special enforcement strategies.

Remember that motivation isn’t the issue here – intent is. Attacking a black person to coerce or intimidate other black people is materially worse than randomly assaulting some unfortunate passerby. The later is aimed at only one person; the former targets a (potentially vulnerable) community.

I’m not sure that I can explain myself without getting rather deep into the philosophical weeds, but this seems importantly mistaken. In short, the reason that doing violence or otherwise committing crimes “in an effort to harass, provoke or intimidate” is certainly more serious, and possibly deserving of more serious punishment, than doing the same violence or committing the same crimes without such ends in mind, is that the former behaviors constitute different actions than the latter, in much the same way that waterboarding a CIA agent as a part of SERE training isn’t an act of torture while doing the very same thing to an unwilling al Qaeda member clearly can be. True, attacking someone as a means to coerce or intimidate or – perhaps – harass or provoke is reasonably regarded as a more serious crime than “mere” random assault, and it doesn’t seem inappropriate to include within the law a category that defines it as such; we do just this sort of thing, after all, in differentiating murder from manslaughter. But obviously it shouldn’t matter at all whether such a behavior was gone in for as a consequence of hatred for some vulnerable group rather than, say, some other sociopathic tendency or perhaps the desire to draw attention to some political cause.

Hate crime laws have got, in other words, everything to do with “motivation” rather than “intent”: just as it’s possible to intimidate or attempt to sow severe unrest on the grounds of something other than hate, so someone who attacks a homeless person because he hates or resents his homelessness clearly need not have in mind any of the wider goals that Will alludes to. And it’s those goals, rather than the particular sorts of subjective affections that motivate them, that are relevant to the determination of the seriousness of a crime.

- St. Ignatius of Loyola

(P.S. Sorry to have been AWOL for the past few days; we had a conference in my department and I was commenting on a paper. I’ve got some things queued up to go out soon, though – and also some exciting blog-related news about to come down the wire.)

[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up.  For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]

I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and ads for it were plastered all over the city – there was one night in particular that I couldn’t get away from them (I think I was waiting on a bus) and I couldn’t bear to look at them – not because I thought it was gross, or dirty, or anything like that, but because, even though these were the bodies of “donors,” I felt it was disrespectful to them to ogle the dead body. I’ve always felt those taboos particularly strongly (and, contra Van Hagens, I don’t see anything wrong with that). Anyway, at risk of repeating what’s already been said, we now have this:

A new exhibition featuring preserved dead bodies having sex opened in Berlin on Thursday with critics saying a maverick German anatomist dubbed “Doctor Death” has gone too far this time.

The couple, part of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition “The Cycle of Life”, is the “low point in his tastelessness”, Michael Braun, culture expert from the conservative CDU party, told AFP.

Von Hagens said his copulating couples show the sexual act in “bracing clarity”.

The exhibits, of four “consenting donors”, are in a separate room accessible only to over-16s.

But it is, in a sense, the inevitable extreme if there’s an insistence on dividing the body and the soul, the worldly and the spiritual, and declaring the former base and unworthy and the latter alone sacred or noble. If we are prisoners in our bodies, why not conquer and imprison the prison itself, to free ourselves, as one might say the name of an incubus to defeat it?

The religious case against it is easier—to point out the role of creature and Creator, to remind one that such subjugation of the body is, in fact, to forget that, in the words of Rabbi Heschel, man “is the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced”: that the body and the soul are essential to state of being human.

A more secular case is harder, especially for me; I’ve been raised to think that there are just certain things one doesn’t do: that the taboos are there for a reason; that even if there is nothing behind them, they are good for the order and structure and survival of society? That this “liberation” from the bodily prison, the so-called subjugation of the guards is actually the subjugation of the human body to the fruits of human technology—only reinforcing Wendell Berry’s dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical, and that it is a dangerous symptom of the growing dependence on that which cannot be sustained inevitably? That, in other words, we would liberate ourselves from one prison into another? (Are these even truly “secular” anymore?)

I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a good non-religious case against what I’d term the body’s desecration; but any argument against it must be founded on the belief that there is something unique in mankind. The moment a human being is literally “just another animal,” anything is permitted.

Last night, I saw Leonard Cohen perform at the Chicago Theatre. Those brave gracious few who took the time to read what I had to say at phaidimoi logoi may already be familiar with my affinity for the man’s work – and my insistence that he’s not just singing about love and sex, even when he’s singing about love and sex.

I used to phrase it (at least to myself) that he was a little like John Donne: when he’s talking about romance, he’s talking about G-d; when he’s talking about G-d, he’s talking about romance. But it struck me in the middle of a song last night—and I forget which song, other than that it wasn’t “Hallelujah” because that song came in the second half of the show—that yes, it’s like Donne, and that line of Faulkner about Keats (“He’s talking about a girl.” “Well, he had to talk about something.”), but, more importantly to the purpose, it’s like the Song of Songs: the relationship between the human and the divine—the striving for each other—embodied in the imagery of a human romance.

This isn’t a quality found throughout Cohen’s work. His earlier writing has an arrogance to it—and is itself aware of (and not entirely comfortable with, I think) that arrogance. But something changes about mid-career—he becomes more reverent about the world, one might say—and it’s most prominent on Various Positions. Cohen himself described “If It Be Your Will” as “more a prayer than a song” than stemmed from “dark times” which eventually led him into that retreat from the world into Zen and “a rigorous study of religion.”

But back to the Song of Songs. Songs on Various Positions that are ostensibly about human romance begin to make more sense. In “Dance Me to the End of Love,” the addressed is leading the dance, and the one playing the music itself—and the title is rephrased as a request to “Show me slowly what I only / know the limits of”: with the wedding imagery, it feels strikingly like the songs of the Kabbalat Shabbat service. “If It Be Your Will” is undeniably a prayer (undeniably beautiful and deserves a lengthy essay of its own. The Shekhinah can be found in “Night Comes On” (or else I’m very, very guilty of the sin of over-reading). “Coming Back to You”: it’s bizarre as just a love song; add in a dash of t’shuvah, and it makes more sense: why is he looking for his former lover “in everyone”? How can the act of coming back occur while he’s alone in his room? And the fourth verse: this ideal lover has many loves, why is the beloved “choos[ing] the precious few” and why the need (and willingness!) for all of them to leave and move beyond pride and themselves?

(In relation to that last question, David Goldman at the First Things “Spengler” blog: “God’s love is what is terrifying, for it consumes the individual ego and annihilates the human sense of self.” – which is, he says, channeling the late Rabbi Soloveitchik, why the lovers elude each other – and must– in the Song of Songs.)

And “Hallelujah.” Writing for the Trib, Greg Kot completely misses the point:

The song about sex, temptation, adultery and religion spirals even further inward and becomes a meditation on the meaning — or perhaps the meaninglessness — of life. The shout of devotion morphs into an ecstatic cry and then a defeated moan. The interjection that means “Praise ye the Lord” turns hollow. In the end, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

“Maybe there’s a God above/And all I ever learned from love/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.”

What’s wrong here is that this isn’t the final verse. It’s simply not the emotionally and spiritual moment at which the song ends. While he himself is perfectly willing to shuffle the order of the verses, Cohen – in every version I’ve heard (and thanks to Youtube, this is many) – ends with the declaration: “And even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!” It all goes wrong, but he’s still proclaiming Hallelujah!, despite it. Defeated, nihilist moan it is not.  Rather, like the proclamations of love in the Song of Songs, it is the declaration of a spurned lover, still in search of the beloved.

It isn’t just about G-d, and by no means are all his writings. (Ignoring the other sides and aspects of his lyrics is also to cheapen them.) But to secularize his work can be to lose the depth and beauty of the words themselves.

That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates for “universal” preschool have drawn on the work of Chicago economist James Heckman, whose research on the social and economic benefits of preschool programs is frequently put forward in support of the claim that federal and state governments need to make publicly-funded preschooling available to all. That Heckman’s work would be used to this end isn’t initially very surprising: he’s a Nobel laureate, after all, and his research into the economic benefits of preschool has turned up some tremendously encouraging results. But as I wrote in my column, Heckman’s case for preschool simply isn’t a case for universal preschool, and using his work to such an end requires ignoring a number of his own convictions:

[Heckman] is much more careful than many of those who appeal to his work to distinguish between the sorts of targeted preschool programs that have actually been found to work and huge, multibillion-dollar boondoggles like the Obama-Biden “Zero to Five” plan. While Heckman does speak and write passionately about the value of intensive early intervention in the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enlisting him as an advocate for a federally-sponsored universal preschool program requires severe distortions of his actual views: for example, a 2006 essay that Heckman wrote for the Wall Street Journal closes with the observation that there is “little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost,” and “no reason for [early childhood] interventions to be conducted in public centers.”

“Vouchers,” Heckman continues, “that can be used in privately run programs would promote competition and efficiency in the provision of early enrichment programs. They would allow parents to choose the venues and values offered in the programs that enrich their child’s earliest years.” Appropriately targeted, means-tested, and choice-driven ventures are one thing; but to spend public dollars in such a way as to “try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing,” as he put it in a 2005 interview, is “foolish.”

So what gives? What I wrote at the time, and still think is basically right, was that Heckman has been able to be enlisted on the side of universal preschool largely because opponents of such policies have failed to claim the moral high ground in anything like the way that they’ve – arguably, anyway – claimed it so successfully in the “school choice” approach to primary and secondary education. And again, there’s a reason for this: the kind of programs that Heckman’s research has found to work haven’t been ones like Head Start; they’re far more expensive than a universal program ever could be, and involve quite a lot more time and effort than preschool usually does. When Heckman cautions against universality as in the quotes above, or concludes a paper (gated, I guess) that discusses the famed Perry Preschool Program by saying that “[i]nvesting in disadvantaged (my emphasis – JS) young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large”, he means exactly what he says: every dollar spent on taxpayer-funded daycare for rich and middle-class kids is a dollar not spent on having teachers come, as they did in the Perry Program, to visit the homes of kids who are worse off. But as it is, there’s no real constituency for spending tens of thousands of dollars a head only on the lower-class kids who’d really stand – and need – to benefit.

All of which is just to say that politics is a drag, isn’t it? On one team you’ve got a group that supports the educational lobby and so favors universality; on the other you’ve got the group that screams “Socialism!” and “Statism!” at the faintest whiffs of redistribution or government intervention; and over on the sidelines you’ve got a rag-tag group, clinging tightly to the data showing that they’ve got an idea that just might work, watching the ongoing battle with horror and occasionally spitting into the wind. I think I need a beer.

(Cross-posted.)