As the political philosopher Robert P. George has argued, the proper role of government is to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare by protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties. The government fulfills its roles in two ways: directly, by protecting the lives and safety of citizens, and indirectly, by supporting the work of families, religious communities, and other mediating institutions of civil society. Fulfilling the task of advancing the general welfare requires that government be limited in order not to infringe on the fundamental rights and basic liberties that it is charged with protecting. Limited government is therefore not a goal but an instrumental good. As such, our advocacy for governmental limitation must be subordinated to our defense of the “permanent things” that command our true allegiance. We can’t forget that like many other conservative concepts, answers can only be judged to be right when we understand the questions they are answering.
But there’s a lot of potential once and if students do share hardware, particularly when it comes to e-readers and e-books. As we noted in our recent coverage of Highlighter, we’re seeing lots of ways to mark up content, make notes in the margins, and share or save these electronically. But there’s also the potential for real-time interaction, within the e-book itself, where readers can hold discussions within the text and within the app itself. That may seem like anathema to the idea of the solitary reading experience. And critics will point out that the social aspect create distractions from reading. But we can also argue that the social element can add depth to the understanding of what’s being read, just as book clubs do. Peers can help define words and concepts that are sometimes hard to grasp when reading alone.
There’s a BIG difference between social experiences that happen after reading and those that happen before and during reading. For good or ill.
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.
Boy, did I have this problem on Wheaton-in-England this summer. After seven weeks of making decision after decision after decision — not just for myself but for forty other people — I got thoroughly exhausted. And impatient. And, probably, unreliable.
Critics also seem uncomfortable with the fact that the film includes comedy. Non-black critics, too, are regularly exhibiting the same supposedly wise skepticism of such “hijinks;” the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis considers the occasional comedy scenes trivializing, as if in the old South blacks and whites spending most of their waking lives with one another interacted solely in chilly, guarded fashion. We like to imagine it that way, as it comforts us that we are aware of the injustice of racism. But to dismiss about ten total minutes of edgy antics involving Minny and about five more involving commodes and bad hair days as rendering the whole movie “about ironing out differences and letting go of the past and anger” is, ironically, a dehumanization of the black experience.We dishonor black people of the past in assuming that they spent their entire lives fuming at the white man and suffering his abuse. As human beings with a survival instinct, they carved meaningful existences out of what they had been given. This included laughing and good times and, yes, some of it was between whites and blacks.
Laughing, good times, and love, too. The titillation aspect assures that we are regularly taught about the carnal part—Sally Hemmings and such. But maids who raise people’s children have always come to love them, and even Jim Crow could not stanch this fundamental aspect of human nature. It was once common in South Carolina and Georgia for white children to grow up speaking the maids’ “Geechee” dialect, so close was this kind of bond. Aibileen’s love for a little white girl seems to especially get under many critics’ skin: “The kind of ambiguity and complexity that a woman like Aibileen would have felt for that white child is too much for the filmmakers to handle,” Boyd complains. But it could be that it’s Boyd who doesn’t want to handle that a black maid could hate the racism of her society and yet love an innocent white child she spends six days a week one on one.
Starting from the idea of historical uniqueness, Auden developed an elaborate vocabulary for different kinds of social order and for the analogous kinds of formal order that give shape to poems. Unique persons create different kinds of social order from those generated by impersonal forces. Historical individuals, Auden wrote, join into communities united by their shared voluntary love of something; a community is historical because it has no bureaucratic impersonal structure. Communities tend to create societies that can carry out their purposes; societies are natural, not historical, because they have a bureaucratic structure in which individual members have roles distinct from their unique personalities. A group of music-lovers is a community but its love accomplishes nothing; a string quartet is a society that puts into effect the community’s love.A crowd, unlike a society or community, is a mere plurality of things that happen to be together. “The subject matter of poetry”, Auden wrote in 1949, “is a crowd of past historic occasions of feeling”, some portion of which the poet hopes to convert into a community; but the poem in which that community is embodied is a society, something that the poet must assume will remain unchanged and eternal once it is written. Crowds of feelings are not especially dangerous; but in the real world the extreme version of the crowd was the Public, that faceless purposeless mass that anyone can join when one is no one in particular.
The Public has always existed, but one effect of the mass media is to make it easier than ever to be faceless and impersonal. The culture of celebrity is one result of the growth of the Public: “the public instinctively worships not great men of action or thought but actors, individuals who by profession are not themselves.” The moral consequences are all too clear: “The public, therefore, can be persuaded to do or believe anything by those who know how to manage it. It will subscribe thousands of dollars to a cancer research fund or massacre Jews with equal readiness, not because it wants to do either, but because it has no alternative game to suggest.”
I suppose what I do in the simplest sense, which is also perhaps the most important sense, is to write clear, interesting sentences. This is where it all starts. One has an idea, and it begins to develop, and I may take notes every so often, write down possible names as characters begin to develop; but it doesn’t really mean much until I put words on paper. Hemingway’s old dictum is still strongly in mind, which is “get black on white”; and that’s what I do. I have an old manual typewriter; I hit the typewriter keys and march the words forward. Words not only have meanings, they even have visual elements. I can see words that connect in a sentence by what they look like, not only by what they mean, and by the sound they have. And that’s what I do, sentence after sentence, day after day. And as I do this, I begin to understand the characters more, I begin to sense the structure of whatever it is I’m writing. Sometimes this takes a long time, other times it’s apparent very soon. And it’s all a mystery. I think of fiction as a mystery, and I wait for answers.
The creation of a post-imperial America is the most urgent—and potentially most liberating—adventure for Americans in the 21st century. What will Americans make of their country if they lose their conviction of an exalted destiny? Resistance to the waning of the white American imperium will surely be widespread and adamant—witness the descent of the Right into nativist and fundamentalist lunacy. But relinquishing empire as a way of life, giving up the delusion that the world will fall apart without the ordering of our money and armaments, presents a moment of possibility: we could embrace the decline of our global supremacy with a joyful sense of emancipation. If we are weaker and poorer, we’ll also be freer to arrange our common life by wiser and saner standards—perhaps by standards that reflect our professed belief that the poor are blessed, and that the meek, not the strong, will inherit the earth. If that unlikely but not impossible reformation transpires, Andrew Bacevich will be among those who deserve our thanks for their service.
Modernist studies is a vibrant and exciting area of study, and many new postgraduates are being drawn to the field. The future is likely to mean more interdisciplinary work, increased attention to the transnational and post-colonial aspects of Modernism, and more discussion of the material culture of Modernism. Seeking to revive the radical energy and experimentation that drove earlier forms of Modernism is no bad thing in a contemporary cultural environment that often seems overly attached to the safe and the familiar. Debate will continue around the use of terms such as avant-garde, modern and Modernist to describe past as well as current works of art. And it is not inconceivable to imagine a time when the talk is once again of Post-Modernism, but the Modernism that it might supplant will this time be more accurately represented and considered. At the moment, however, the more likely picture is one in which diverse Modernisms continue to inform our cultural and artistic futures.
Pardon the academic note, but I would just add that study of the most famous modernists — Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Yeats, etc. — has been languishing for many years, and languishing, I think, because they found in the first decades after their death a set of scholars whose intellects rivaled their own. Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner, in the second half of the twentieth century, created a portrait of magisterial Modernism that has never really been displaced, but has never been strongly challenged either. They ruled the scholarly roost in their own day and they effectively rule it now, if only because no great rival accounts have yet been forthcoming.
And I’ll add this: the work of literary criticism I most wish I had written is Kenner’s The Pound Era. What an amazing, beautiful, constantly surprising book. I believe that one day it will itself be seen as one of the monuments of Modernism.
(via Kill Shakespeare).
So you decide to put Shakespeare and his characters in a comic, and the only plan you can come up with is to have everybody try to kill one another? Imaginative.