Thursday, August 12, 2004
OO continues on modesty, again, against someone who I think Jenni dislikes
First the regular stuff
This blog was never conceived as a place to address leftist arguments, nor will it become such. The pile is just too deep; the work too unenjoyable; and the personal relationship usually required to convert another's heart on fundamental issues, absent.
That said, I turn my attention briefly to this young lady's objections to my modesty post.
First off, a stylistic point. I thought conservatives were supposed to be the pre-fabricated, indoctrinated ones! I mean, really. If I tried to write the usual leftist objection to my own article, it would not be far from this. One wonders whether to look for a direct cable connection from her head to a 486 in the basement of NARAL.
Second, I have absolutely no idea whether the lady is going to hell. I have no idea about her education, motivations, or life history. I also know that just about every bourgeois college girl I've met in DC holds the same opinion as she does. You can't be spoon-fed into hell; you actually have to do some of your own work to contribute to that general trajectory. That aside, filling the mind with bad philosophy and concupiscence makes the Devil's job a lot easier. Having been led to a precipice, one only needs to make a surprisingly small individual contribution to end in disaster. I am surprised the Devil has anything to do at all after Kant, Rousseau and the 1960s. If the state of Catholic education continues the way it has been, someday we (viz., the Devil and I) may meet in the unemployment line -- surely a bizarre encounter.
Now, on to the argument in the briefest form possible:
" . . . strikes me as a teeny bit crazy."
Yet the lady doesn't articulate a single concept that could be used to judge when dress is "sane" or "insane." Instead she appeals to taste, which is relative and subjective.
Or, to put her statement and my response another way:
"God forbid that we shouldn't look like the people we see on TV!"
As a remedy, I suggest a dose of history. You'd be surprised what weird shit people once did. The wrong lesson to take from this is that your own culture's most recent, default mindset just happens to be -- by the greatest coincidence in the world -- the non-weird one. And saying "We're all weird in our own way" is contentless. Against the more fully-clothed example of earlier generations, are we really so sure we're not the crazy ones? And how would we know? Are the fashion debacles of the 1970s so distant that they can't be used as a metaphor? I'll try, nonetheless. Have you at least seen pictures of the ugly people in avocado and puce polyester clothes with the nappy hair? Did you notice how happy and fashionable they think they are? The flesh-kaleidoscope that typifies fashion this latest half-century might look as weird as chartreuse bellbottoms 100 years from now. In 2105 we might be calling now "La Nue Epoche," except the fin-de-siecle decorative posters will be completely abstract or cubist, and so not nearly as racy as one might imagine. Nonetheless they will just as dated, and bought by 22nd-century college students trying to decorate their rooms in slightly antiquarian fashion. The miniskirt: bustle of the mid 1900s. But that's crazy talk, I’m sure.
Then the interesting stuff
But in reality, such an offer of reciprocity is not generous. It is an imposition. Politics is about how we structure our public life. Despite how often we reassure ourselves we are perfectly autonomous rational islands -- doing whatever we want in self-directed isolation from everyone else unless we are physically coerced -- communal life really shapes how each of us thinks, what we value, how we act, and how we respond to the events of daily existence. Your world where people are free to abort or not abort, gays are free to sodomize or not to sodomize, and people are free to masturbate to their hearts' content or be chaste, is a very different world than a place where sexual morality obtains the force of law.
Both worlds shape the people who live in them involuntarily. Both are impositions. The only question is therefore: Which imposition is better? The lady's whole blog doesn't offer a single argument which gets beyond the presumptuous self-referential impasse of the "-choice" canard.
This blog was never conceived as a place to address leftist arguments, nor will it become such. The pile is just too deep; the work too unenjoyable; and the personal relationship usually required to convert another's heart on fundamental issues, absent.
That said, I turn my attention briefly to this young lady's objections to my modesty post.
First off, a stylistic point. I thought conservatives were supposed to be the pre-fabricated, indoctrinated ones! I mean, really. If I tried to write the usual leftist objection to my own article, it would not be far from this. One wonders whether to look for a direct cable connection from her head to a 486 in the basement of NARAL.
Second, I have absolutely no idea whether the lady is going to hell. I have no idea about her education, motivations, or life history. I also know that just about every bourgeois college girl I've met in DC holds the same opinion as she does. You can't be spoon-fed into hell; you actually have to do some of your own work to contribute to that general trajectory. That aside, filling the mind with bad philosophy and concupiscence makes the Devil's job a lot easier. Having been led to a precipice, one only needs to make a surprisingly small individual contribution to end in disaster. I am surprised the Devil has anything to do at all after Kant, Rousseau and the 1960s. If the state of Catholic education continues the way it has been, someday we (viz., the Devil and I) may meet in the unemployment line -- surely a bizarre encounter.
Now, on to the argument in the briefest form possible:
" . . . strikes me as a teeny bit crazy."
Yet the lady doesn't articulate a single concept that could be used to judge when dress is "sane" or "insane." Instead she appeals to taste, which is relative and subjective.
Or, to put her statement and my response another way:
"God forbid that we shouldn't look like the people we see on TV!"
As a remedy, I suggest a dose of history. You'd be surprised what weird shit people once did. The wrong lesson to take from this is that your own culture's most recent, default mindset just happens to be -- by the greatest coincidence in the world -- the non-weird one. And saying "We're all weird in our own way" is contentless. Against the more fully-clothed example of earlier generations, are we really so sure we're not the crazy ones? And how would we know? Are the fashion debacles of the 1970s so distant that they can't be used as a metaphor? I'll try, nonetheless. Have you at least seen pictures of the ugly people in avocado and puce polyester clothes with the nappy hair? Did you notice how happy and fashionable they think they are? The flesh-kaleidoscope that typifies fashion this latest half-century might look as weird as chartreuse bellbottoms 100 years from now. In 2105 we might be calling now "La Nue Epoche," except the fin-de-siecle decorative posters will be completely abstract or cubist, and so not nearly as racy as one might imagine. Nonetheless they will just as dated, and bought by 22nd-century college students trying to decorate their rooms in slightly antiquarian fashion. The miniskirt: bustle of the mid 1900s. But that's crazy talk, I’m sure.
Then the interesting stuff
But in reality, such an offer of reciprocity is not generous. It is an imposition. Politics is about how we structure our public life. Despite how often we reassure ourselves we are perfectly autonomous rational islands -- doing whatever we want in self-directed isolation from everyone else unless we are physically coerced -- communal life really shapes how each of us thinks, what we value, how we act, and how we respond to the events of daily existence. Your world where people are free to abort or not abort, gays are free to sodomize or not to sodomize, and people are free to masturbate to their hearts' content or be chaste, is a very different world than a place where sexual morality obtains the force of law.
Both worlds shape the people who live in them involuntarily. Both are impositions. The only question is therefore: Which imposition is better? The lady's whole blog doesn't offer a single argument which gets beyond the presumptuous self-referential impasse of the "-choice" canard.
