[gallery] architectural-review:
National Pantheon of Kazakhstan. Competition proposal 2014. Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg, Top Tachapol Tanaboonchai and Grace Suthata Jiranuntarat
a way of writing
There is a genre of writing to which I am particularly devoted, but whose name I do not know. I can only give examples. I think it may have been invented by William Hazlitt, in “The Fight”. Another wonderful instance is Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — the essay, not the book that includes it. This nameless genre combines reporting, observation, social commentary, and deeply felt personal experience, though the experience is often subterranean, or refracted and indirect.
For some years now I have thought that the best current practitioner of this curious mode of narration is John Jeremiah Sullivan, to whom I was introduced when I stumbled on his moving account of attending a Christian rock festival. His “Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” is a recent small masterpiece, though the mastery is not Sullivan’s own, since it is accompanied by photographs, recordings, and filmed interviews, and is presented beautifully. (It’s worth noting, perhaps, that this nameless genre is highly receptive to documentary supplementation.)
In any event, Sullivan is a fantastic writer, and I read everything of his I can find. But I think that in the last few years another writer has come onto the scene who works this territory as beautifully as Sullivan does, though in a different voice, a different register. His name is Brian Phillips, and you owe it to yourself to read his new essay on Sumo wresting, and several other things as soon as you can manage it. Take your time; read it slowly and with care.
Consider the fact that it takes roughly one million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii’s release “Wake Me Up!” that I co-wrote and sing, for example, was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13thmost played song on Pandora since its release in 2013, with more than 168 million streams in the US. And yet, that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties – which were then split among three songwriters and our publishers. In return for co-writing a major hit song, I’ve earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.
The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things
The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things
“He finds the analogy unhelpful”
This is true!
“and suggests that I am blind to the imperatives of charity.”
This is not true: I said that the decision to offer such benefits would be “eminently defensible … on the grounds of charity.” To say that a position can be defended by appealing to a virtue is in no way to say that anyone who holds a different view is blind to that virtue.
“He assumed I’m making an analogy between Nazism and gays.”
Absolutely untrue! I imagined the headlines that would be written in response to your rhetoric, and (based on what I have seen online) I imagined correctly. Given the pervasiveness of the reductio ad Hitlerum in our discursive culture, any attempt to analogize the Nazi era to our own is going to be read in that way, and it seems to me that you should have anticipated that and sought a different analogy. In writing the sentence “Hitler in 1933 didn’t look so bad—and respectable gay couples don’t seem a threat to marriage or anything else” — in which the church is not mentioned and “Hitler” is grammatically parallel to “respectable gay couples” — you did as much as you could do to ensure that people would say “Reno thinks gays are like Nazis.”
I don’t accuse you of a lack of charity or moral obtuseness, but I think you were rhetorically very careless, and I don’t think that helps the cause of Christian social conservatives.
and one more note on politics
I’m a seamless-garment pro-lifer who strongly opposes foreign-policy adventurism, wants to see the total dismantling of the national-security-state apparatus, supports seriously Green policies at the national level despite being generally a strong proponent of subsidiarity, and cares most of all about the preservation — indeed the extension — of our eroding religious freedoms. So I have lots of excellent options this Election Day!
Look, I don’t expect the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the stupidity and unseriousness of our politics is exhausting. It makes me think in more more uncharitable moments that if you want to serve in Congress, something must be wrong with you.
Those of us who vote for third parties do so primarily because we feel that the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin, beholden to special interests and lobbyists, offering no real change. We feel they are groups who do not represent our own personal, moral, political, ethical views and concerns. We feel that voting for them would be a wasted vote. And so, we vote Libertarian, Socialist, Green, Constitutional, and all the other viable third-party choices that we are given.And every year, we are mocked and derided for participating in our patriotic duty, told that we are wasting our vote by people who we feel just wasted their vote.
in which David Sessions and I keep talking
David Sessions has patiently answered my questions, so let me offer a few replies in turn.
First, I don’t think that “writing on the internet, arguing on the internet” is one thing, any more than writing per se and arguing per se are one thing. There are many ways to write and argue, for many different audiences, and we don’t all have to play the same “game.” More on this later.
Second, David writes, “What I’m trying to demonstrate here is that substantive argument can be combined with an appropriate degree of meanness when the target legitimates it.” I very much agree with that as a general principle, but I don’t think he lives up to it in his original post — in fact, I think he explicitly disavows it. He says that it’s “obvious” what Walsh is, and “To try to demonstrate that Matt Walsh is a douchebag would be pointless, as well as an insult to anyone who sacrifices their sanity and financial well-being to master difficult knowledge, like how to write.” So instead David calls him a douchebag, over and over again. Relatedly …
In that original post, David writes,
What Walsh shares with mainstream hot-takers and evangelical emotibloggers alike is that he writes largely without the intention of trying to stake a position, reject or argue with any position, or persuade any reader. His position is presumed from the start, and he adds nothing beyond scare-quoting and free-association. This feminism post, for example, seems to be an extended attempt to arrive at the most exalted metaphorical epithet to bestow upon that obviously Satanic movement. The whole “analysis,” which takes off from a viral video of little girls saying the F-word, depends on you already thinking it is an indication of deep moral corruption that a society could produce, much less laugh at, a video of little girls saying the F-word. (We all know kids saying the F-word, with or without political intent, is hilarious.)
It was this part of the post that made think that this might be intentional self-parody, because in the same paragraph that he complains about Walsh simply assuming the rightness of his position, he writes, “We all know kids saying the F-word, with or without political intent, is hilarious.” (“We all know.”) And in the same paragraph that he complains about Walsh using scare-quotes in place of argument, he scare-quotes “analysis.”
I don’t know whether Sessions is right about Walsh or not, and as I explained in my previous post I don’t intend to find out, but it seems to me quite clear that he is doing pretty much exactly what he accuses Walsh of doing. Rather than arguing, he says that his target is not worthy of an actual argument, and chooses instead to score easy points for an audience that he confidently presumes already agrees with him. (“We all know.”)
So insofar as David’s original post was an argument about a lamentable rhetorical style — and I took that to be his main point, with Walsh as an exemplar of it rather than a unique figure — I think it’s really unfortunate how fully he participates in that very style. If he really does care about having reasoned and charitable and substantive debate online, shouldn’t he take particular care to play a different game than Matt Walsh is playing?
Walsh’s ignorance and douchebaggery may be in a class by themselves, but his prominence is the product of forces that implicate the entire internet, the entire media, and our entire political discourse. What does it mean for the possibility of reasonable and informed debate when people like this have the ideal formula for winning the game we all, like it or not, are playing?
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What exactly is this game that we are all playing?
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Who are “we”?
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Isn’t there a bit of a problem with lamenting the absence of “substantive debate … careful and charitable argument … reasonable and informed debate” in a post in which you describe the people you disagree with in this kind of language: “a moron and a bad writer”; “the Platonic ideal of a douchebag”; “a douchebag”; “a shameless voice”; “echoes the more general prejudices of douchebag politics”; “a gurgling font of reactionary babble”?
4) Sessions writes of Walsh, “His position is presumed from the start, and he adds nothing beyond scare-quoting and free-association,” and then a few words later he begins a sentence, “The whole ‘analysis’” … so this is intentional self-parody, right? That’s what the whole “game we’re all playing” stuff is about, yes? Please tell me it is.