Maximos's blog
Posted at 12:48pm on Feb. 7, 2008 Oblivion Beckons
By Maximos
I want, at some level beneath that at which my conscious political reasoning occurs, to like John McCain - to like him in the sense that I could support his candidacy, or at least reconcile myself to it. His personal narrative is compelling, though I might admit to being tired of hearing about events which lost their salience before I entered primary school. His opposition to the attempts of the Bush administration to normalize torture as an element of American policy is heroic. Even the idea of the much-reviled campaign-finance-reform legislation holds its appeal for me. In execution, the legislation has been an abomination, so much so that one suspects that the stated intentions were merely a noble lie cloaking the actual intentions; but the idea of draining the DC swamps of the corrupting influence of various malefactors of wealth - well, that's a wonderful idea, if it entails shutting down K Street, and eliminating the corrupt and corrupting revolving door between business, lobbying, and government work. I'll give McCain begrudging credit for the idea, at least. (Note carefully my phraseology: CFR would have been meaningful had it aimed to shovel out K Street and the like; as it exists, it is nothing more than a cynical incumbent protection scheme.) Furthermore, I'll even credit McCain with "inadvertent prescience" for his role in the Gang of 14 episode; the Almighty knows that we'll need the prerogative during the coming nomination battles, if only the courage can be mustered to use the power and endure the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy - but if we genuinely believe that jurists who misconstrue the Constitution in certain ways oughtn't be doing so, and that their rulings are travesties of fundamental law, then it follows, logically, that the Democrats are not entitled, by virtue of electoral victories, to pack the courts with such hacks. Wrong is wrong.
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Posted at 12:25pm on Aug. 13, 2007 What "Fighting Them Over There" Really Means
By Maximos
Via Rod Dreher:
Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.
"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.
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Posted at 2:09pm on Jun. 5, 2007 A Notice for An Evocation of the Age
By Maximos
My latest post, an attempt at characterizing the broader historical moment through which we are passing, is up at What's Wrong With the World, the group blog to which I contribute.
Thoughtful dissent is welcomed.
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Posted at 5:31pm on Jun. 2, 2007 A Notice for "Imagine...."
By Maximos
"Imagine..." is the title of my latest short piece over at What's Wrong With the World, the group blog to which I contribute.
"Imagine..." is a lighthearted little allegory concerning an aspect of the immigration controversy which now troubles the body politic.
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Posted at 2:24pm on Apr. 12, 2007 Innumeracy as Hieroglyph
By Maximos
One might be forgiven for surmising that sheer innumeracy is a requirement for advancement in the American establishment when even fellows of the Council on Foreign Relations, the establishment of the establishment, as it were, exhibit the vice. Nevertheless, such innumeracy seldom appears unadorned, but requires a bit of intellectual scaffolding if it is to present itself as persuasive; a popular form of such scaffolding is the discussion of demographic trends, the type erected by Shannon O'Neil in a recent LA Times piece, in which the effort is made to dismiss concerns about immigration as being exercises in irrelevancy.
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Posted at 4:34pm on Nov. 29, 2006 On Casting Pearls
By Maximos
Yesterday, I posted a blog entry in which I endeavoured to critique what I consider to be a fatal flaw in the political strategy of the pro-life movement. That strategy has emphasized the election of Presidents, and later Senators, amenable to the nomination and eventual confirmation of jurists adhering to an originalist philosophy of jurisprudence to the Supreme Court, the operating assumption being that such justices would be likely to restrain, and even reverse, in certain cases, the enthusiasms of previous Courts for the conjuration of novel "rights" ungrounded in the original understanding of the import of various Constitutional clauses. It has also emphasized repeated legislative efforts to, ahem, bring the Court to the realization that it is not the only authoritative branch of government. That strategy, moreover, has been predicated upon the assumption that, under the structural logic of the Constitution, the very separation of powers obliges the Court to - apparently - enter into a sort of give-and-take negotiation over the scope and limits of "rights" which do not actually obtain according to the Constitution itself.
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Posted at 2:25pm on Nov. 28, 2006 A Pro-Life Argument Built Upon the Sands
By Maximos
I will not make so bold as to venture any predictions as to the future of the abortion issue in American politics. Well, not quite. I am, being a pessimistic sort of person, skeptical that all of the efforts of conservatives and pro-lifers to secure the nomination of certain types of jurists to the courts will eventuate in the results we expect - or merely hope. The law is a complicated thing - perhaps unnecessarily so, yet necessarily unnecessary, if my meaning may be grasped - filled with many idols. Public opinion is an uncertain thing, manifesting movement away from the sacred totem of Roe yet seemingly unbending in its attachment to unprincipled exceptions, such as those for rape and incest. Public opinion, alas, appears favourable towards that grim, Moloch-like (Because it combines the elements of both sacrifice and commerce, in which the Phoenicians excelled.) research involving the destruction of embryonic life, on forthrightly utilitarian grounds; and that research is an article of religion among its advocates largely because in its presuppositions, externalities, and ambitions, it reposes upon the substrate of the abortion culture. Inconstancy, thy name is democracy.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 1:40pm on Jun. 1, 2006 On Derbyshire on The Party of Death
By Maximos
Ramesh Ponnuru's fine work on the fealty of many intellectual and political elites, particularly on the left side of the political aisle, The Party of Death, despite its status as a lucidly written and cogently argued presentation of the Culture of Life position on our ongoing cultural and political struggles over the relationships between and among science, progress, autonomy, law, and human life, has failed to garner much critical attention from those who reject the Culture of Life, yet decline to concede membership in its antinomy. This unfortunate phenomenon has been noted at Redstate, and has occasioned much spirited dialogue on lefty blogsites - to which I refuse to link - and at Ross Douthat and Reihan Salim's blog, The American Scene, these two threads running to well in excess of 50 comments apiece, totals which, while not entirely unprecedented, are at least atypical for highly literate, wonkish blogs.
However, there has been at least one serious attempt, on the part of a non-Culture of Life partisan, to reckon with the argument of Ponnuru's book. John Derbyshire, hereafter to be referred to solely as the Derb, has published a verbose, sprawling review for The New English Review in which he attempts a rebuttal of Ponnuru's thesis.
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Posted at 10:57am on May 3, 2006 On Culture and Condescension
By Maximos
From time to time, one of the regulars here at RS, having read one of my comments on the immigration question - most frequently, one having to do with the inevitability and undesirability of the cultural fragmentation that is the logical consequence of the present immigration regime - will note my tagline and query me concerning my pessimism. My tagline reads:
My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.
The tagline, for those not familiar with the great liturgical music of the Western Church, is a translation of a conjunction of two verses from the book of Job found together in the texts of the Requiem My interlocutors, then, wish to know whether my pessimism might have a corresponding remedy, whether I envision anything that might be done to avert the 'mourning' part.
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Posted at 9:13am on Mar. 13, 2006 Ideas Without Consequence
By Maximos
One of the noblest aspirations of the founding generation was that for the cultivation of a spirit of public sentiment bereft of the dangerous political vice of faction, the elevation of sectarian, or sectional, interest, above the interest of the nation considered as a whole. Indeed, it was a noble aspiration; and a naive one. The spirit of faction is inextirpable from human nature; one need only flit lightly through the pages of history, or train a wizened gaze upon the present political landscape of America, or even simply watch a few John Hughes films from the 1980s, contemplating, in true postmodern fashion, the lessons of the archetypal American high-school experience: cliques and discrete, invidiously defined and grouped social formations are inescapable, save in the most extraordinary circumstances.
Hence, one ought not be bewildered by the appearance or persistence of factions within the conservative movement itself; a movement that has traditionally reverenced those things that are permanent and adiding, most especially those truths that bear upon the human person, cannot very well imagine, or indulge the illusion, that human nature has been overcome through its ministrations, the vice of faction eliminated and the virtue of unanimity realized. Now, this is by no means to urge upon the reader the notion that faction is always and everywhere a vicious thing, or that unanimity is everywhere and always a virtue. Surely, examples could be multiplied, nearly without limit, of some lonely and heroic figure standing against the tides of his age, or of some groups which, in point of fact, did possess greater perspicacity than others at some crucial juncture of history; conversely, examples could with equal ease be multipied, of instances of unjust and vicious uniformity, of disquieting conformities which have entire societies plunging headlong into some abyss of unreason and depravity. It is only to suggest that perhaps the incipience of a conservative crack-up is a permanent feature of the landscape, an ineliminable characteristic of the movement.
One is, however, fully within his rights, to remain vexed, piqued in his discomfiture, at the appearance of factional sentiment utterly bereft of rational pretext, all but wholly devoid of substantive objections to the phenomena it subjects to its preening condescension. Such, I submit, is the case with respect to much of the vituperation with which Rod Dreher's book, Crunchy Cons was received by some in the mainstream of American conservative thought: a spasm of denunciation and invective which, when rationally analysed, reduces to the claim that because some thing is not instead some other thing, that it is therefore a bad thing, as though, for example, the problem with a Cocker Spaniel is that it is not a Mastiff.
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Posted at 8:38pm on Feb. 23, 2006 Politics and the Myth of a Pre-Social Human Nature
By Maximos
The present moment is one beset by seemingly interminable and intractable (as indeed they must be, given the presuupositions of the contending parties) disputes concerning the relevance of human nature to political, even geopolitical, questions. That may seem, to some, a prima facie absurd and portentious declaration, but there it is. Its truth is manifest in the pathetic and unedifying spectacle of Larry Summers, from his initial, tepid musings to his ritual humiliation, and, now, his announcement of his intended resignation. Its truth is manifest by the unease that falls over many as they ponder the latest findings and reasearches of sociobiologists. Perhaps, most consequentially, it is it is manifest by the fact that, in the wake of the cartoon jihad and continued spasms of irrational violence in the dar al Islam, we yet find ourselves having to debate and defend the proposition that it might not be the case that vast swathes of the Muslim world desire 'freedom", 'democracy', 'liberty' and other cognate concepts of the modern, Western political tradition (democracy-whiskey-sexy!, anyone?) or, at a minimum, that they might comprehend by those terms and concepts things substantively different than what we comprehend by them. For, let any man gainsay the porposition that all men alike, without distinction, are desirous of liberty and democracy as we understand those things, and officials of our own government will rise to declaim that to express scepticism concerning the validity of that proposition as a reflection of the actuality of things is to succumb to dark lures of racism, ethnocentrism, and plain inhumanity.
Read on...
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Posted at 2:51am on Feb. 5, 2006 Personal Obligations Are Not Always Political, or Why I Don't Care About the Cartoons
By Maximos
I sometimes notice myself wishing that I were naive enough to be even mildly taken aback by the reaction of many Muslims to the high drama of a few political cartoons, but I am compelled, in such moments, to remind myself that adulthood exacts its tolls. One of those tolls is the knowledge that there are some things which one cannot allow oneself to unlearn, several of which are on display in the controversy over a few cartoons originally published in a Danish newspaper.
Read on, if you're not already thinking of the Super Bowl, which I'll be doing three seconds after I finish typing a few thoughts on this fiasco...
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Posted at 3:34pm on Jan. 5, 2006 Why Should It Be Mystifying?
By Maximos
It ain't a light read, folks, but it's well worth it. -Thomas
It seldom fails to transpire. Let one man venture an opinion to the effect that such and such a policy, or absence of a policy, is inimical to the perpetuation of a shared national identity, to national cohesion, cultural and otherwise, and to the integrity of the culture itself, and the indignant cries will arise. Cries that there is something sinister lurking back of what once would have been unexceptional statements of conservative, nay, simply American sentiment, and cries that there is something unworthy and suspicious in the motives and character of the one voicing the criticism. And if there are not cries, or other forms of impassioned ululation, there are the interrogatories: explain precisely what you mean, what you intend, for if you will not do so to my satisfaction, I will feel myself entitled to consider you bigoted, benighted, and of darkened intellect.
Why, however, should it be thought mystifying for a man - any man - to prefer that which is his own in this life - his home, his family, his church, his culture, his language, his social atmosphere, even, yes, his people, to those others, things and persons, which are not his own, and with which he has no truck, and in which he has no part?
Read on....
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Posted at 2:14am on Dec. 11, 2005 What's Wrong With the ID/Evolution Debate, And What We Can(Not) Do About It.
By Maximos
Promoted from the diaries against all semblance of "better judgment."
Few issues roil the waters of dialogue so tempestuously as does a provocatively stated position on the above-mentioned controversy. Threads on abortion, the war, Terry Schiavo, and the integrity of veterans calling for withdrawal from Iraq may generate lengthier comment threads, but few other topics are capable of summoning the unique combination of posturing, bloviation, mutual incomprehension, the casting of animadversions, incandescent fury, and sheer, spluttering lunacy as is the question of the ID challenge to evolutionary theory.
There exist, blessedly, exceptions to this dreary norm, such as this irenic diary. Unfortunately, most interventions into this controversy are either antagonistic wieldings of pointy sticks, or soon degenerate into the same. Most of us deplore this state of affairs, and what the social ramifications of the antagonisms protend for our nation; nevertheless, there is nothing - nothing - that can be done to lower the temperature of the debate, mitigate the hostilities, and achieve some sort of reconciliation, at least not absent an almost immeasurably far-sighted perspective.
With all due apologies to all those weary of the unending recriminations of this debate, please read on; I come bearing no pointy sticks.
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Posted at 3:21pm on Nov. 8, 2005 Historical Forgetting and the Nonpersons Among Us; Or, the Memory Hole of Liberal Ego-Stroking.
By Maximos
...from the diaries because it is Maximos' first and because it is darned good
Liberalism, conservatives may be pardoned for suspecting, has a rather convoluted doctrine of the human person. In some of the core texts of modern liberal political thought, such as Rawls' Theory of Justice, we find explicated in numbing, soul-crushing detail, the conception of a person as pure volition, all the "contingencies" of time, place, circumstance, and, in a word - history - sandblasted away so as to leave the bare function of choice able to serve as the foundational precept of a political doctrine in which no conception of the Good is - so they say - instantiated in the ideal liberal social order.
This dreary and oppressive philosophy, the logical implication of which is that the mere fact that we possess the capacity for choice is of greater moment than the fact that we are radically situated as members of families, parents, children, and members of concrete communities of memory and descent, has been unfurled to the fullest in the discussions and debates over the riots in France, now spread to other European nations.
Read on....
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