Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

October 2024

Homocentric Universe

IT’S ALL ULTIMATELY AESTHETICS:

Stop Blaming Foucault: It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland (Ari Gandsman, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rory referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.


Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes.

Post-modernism is a return to pre-modernism. Once you get back you have to choose your faith. the oncologists above choose a particularly ugly one.

Long War

“FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS”:

The afterlife of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko: Reflections on forty years since his death shook communist Poland (Ben Sixsmith, 10/19/24, The Critic)

What had made the slim, sickly 37-year-old priest such an imposing enemy of the state? He had preached. He had preached to striking steelworkers in Warsaw. He had preached to the trade unionists of Solidarity. His sermons had been broadcast on “Radio Free Europe”.

He had led the funeral of Grzegorz Przemyk — an 18-year-old aspiring poet who had been beaten to death by police officers. A gigantic funeral procession had marched peacefully in protest.

Censorship was tight in Poland. Its tentacles, Norman Davies wrote in God’s Playground, “regulated the activities of all the media, all news and translation agencies, all publishing houses” et cetera, with themes to be suppressed including “criticism … of the party line, all comparisons between the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, all civil disasters, all shortcomings in industrial safety, all defects in Polish export goods, all references to the superior economic and social standards of non-communist countries and … all information regarding the existence of the censorship.”

One exception was church services. The communists tolerated some amount of independence for the Church — believing that suppression was unsustainable — and Popiełuszko had used that to his advantage.

He had preached about the value of the truth. He had preached against violence and indignities. He had even preached about the virtue of patriotism. His sermons referenced historical events where Polish courage and determination had been illuminated, like the 19th century uprisings and the Miracle on the Vistula. Popiełuszko “did not include the historical references just to present facts,” writes Grzegorz Szczecina:

… although this would have made sense in the context of the Communist propaganda. The main purpose was to show to … fellow Poles the meaning of self-sacrifice and suffering as a price which had to be paid in the struggle for national liberty over centuries.

Music

WONDERED WHEN HE’D BRING US ANOTHER:

The Warriors review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis come out to play with firecracker musical: This concept album based on Walter Hill’s 1979 film features megastar rappers, Hamilton alumni and styles from metalcore to salsa – it is pulled off with breathtaking brio (Chris Wiegand, 17 Oct 2024, The Guardian)

In their adaptation, a concept album that raises the tantalising prospect of a future staging, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis achieve something similar. The blistering, kaleidoscopic opener is presided over by dancehall dynamo Shenseea as a DJ introducing MCs for each borough. Amid punchy fanfares, they are deftly delineated: Chris Rivers as a raspy Bronx, Nas cranking up intrigue as Queens, Cam’ron smoothly humorous as Manhattan (“when you say New York, we’re actually what you mean”), Busta Rhymes’ explosively gruff Brooklyn and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah and RZA spinning ethereal suspense for Staten Island, repeating the detail of their arduous route to the Bronx, “taking a train to a boat to another train”. […]

Miranda and Davis deliver the same lurid pulp jolts as the movie, finding equivalents for Hill’s arsenal of whip pans, wipes and slo-mo violence, yet they also share the more sociological perspective of Sol Yurick’s original 1965 novel and in particular his interest in what gangs offer the alienated and alone. (Yurick drew on his experience working for the city’s welfare department.) A majestic-sounding Lauryn Hill’s solo as Cyrus, If You Can Count, uses several of the character’s rallying lines from the screenplay but builds them into something much more resonant. “Nobody’s wasting nobody” becomes a call not just for laying down arms but for recognising the collective potential of every member in this posited gang of gangs. […]

One of the album’s joys is its unexpected pairings, especially how musical theatre stars are matched with acts from other genres. Broadway’s Alex Boniello teams up with Australian metalcore artist Kim Dracula as the Rogues on a rat-a-tat-tat duet, Going Down, that manages to veer from monstrous destruction to soaring anthem and back again. Dracula channels the toddler rage of the film’s arch-villain Luther (original star David Patrick Kelly gets an album cameo as a cop), and as you’d expect his taunt “come out to play” becomes a thunderous hook.

Books

THE WRONG SHIP FOR ANARCHY, BROTHER:

Patrick O’Brian is a Great Conservative Writer: His concern is the problem of right authority (Henry Farrell, Sep 07, 2024, Programmable Matter)

This is counterposed against the Tory notion of the ship as an organic society, in which the rules are administered so as to provide a kind of general comfort, a belief in an order that is undoubtedly harsh but that still provides some comfort in its harshness. When the Articles of War, with their threats of capital punishment are read out:

Death rang through and through the Articles; and even where the words were utterly incomprehensible the death had a fine, comminatory Leviticus ring, and the crew took a grave pleasure in it all; it was what they were used to – it was what they heard the first Sunday in every month and upon all extraordinary occasions such as this. They found it comfortable to their spirits, and when the watch below was dismissed the men looked far more settled.

There is much in this that is alien – even obnoxious – to modern sensibilities. The claim that it is “what they were used to” is regularly invoked throughout the books as justification for this or that sordid practice. But there is also something that the liberals and left could stand to learn from.

If O’Brian is unfair to Bentham – and he certainly is – he is not entirely unfair. And we are all (for values of ‘we’ that encompass most people who I think read this kind of newsletter), Bentham’s children to some greater or lesser degree. We are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions – introducing measures to help the poor or the working class; improving general ‘prosperity’ – than in talking to, or engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help. Even the most supple forms of democratic authority work through abstractions, formalities and complications, rather than face to face relationships. There isn’t an organic relationship between those who rule or at least influence rule, and those who are ruled. We do not like to think of ourselves as exerting authority, but we most certainly are, through collectively and abstractly legitimated forms of coercion.

Conservatism in its attractive form discovers the troubles of this means of organizing society. I think of Chris Arnade, who makes walking into a form of political discovery, spending days and weeks on foot, going through ordinary neighborhoods and seeing and talking to the people there. The implicit, and sometimes explicit reproach to liberals and the professional left is that we don’t much have these kinds of contacts, except for those of us who do it in a professional capacity. And for many of us (myself included) he’s right. The Whiggish mode of organizing society tends towards a radical disconnection.

And that is the burden of O’Brian’s books. He lays out a conservative alternative – an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain – a good exerciser of authority – ought accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be ‘taut,’ perhaps sometimes even a ‘right hard horse,’ but they should never be a tyrant. O’Brian’s claim – again voiced through Maturin – is that this is very unlikely, but not impossible.

there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late: but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see …

[‘Efficient’ in the last sentence presumably meaning not Whiggishness, but the capacity to get what needs to get done, done.]

This is the great theme of the O’Brian books as I read them, and their great contribution too. Condemning them as middlebrow is silly nonsense. They have their faults, as Dickens does – frequent longueurs; sometimes grotesque contrivances of plot. But so too they have their greatness, and the larger part of that greatness comes from their statement of a particular view of human beings, and their perpetual return to the vexed problem of right authority. We exercise authority over each other; sometimes verging on the absolute. How can we do it well, without becoming monstrous?

One Economy to Rule Them All

MANAGERS ARE THE DRAG ON PRODUCTIVITY:

In-office work mandates are really all about control, not efficiency or value (Gleb Tsipursky, 10/15/24, The Hill)

Recent research led by Pitt professor Mark Ma and graduate student Yuye Ding sheds light on the complex reasons behind organizational leaders’ decisions to force employees to return to working in-office. And it turns out that managers’ motivations diverge significantly from the commonly stated objectives of improved productivity and financial performance.

Ma told me in an interview that the push for more in-office work is more closely associated with managerial desires for control and a tendency to attribute organizational underperformance to the workforce, rather than evidence-based strategies aimed at enhancing corporate value.

Reports from organizations such as Hubstaff and Thumbtack reveal that remote work can lead to higher efficiency and productivity, challenging the assumption physical office presence is inherently more productive. Furthermore, insights from McKinsey and Aquent highlight that remote and hybrid models done right foster high-performing teams and support diversity and innovation compared to in-office models.

Energy

EVERYONE WINS:

This farmer was skeptical about solar — until he began grazing sheep ( Kari Lydersen,
15 October 2024, Canary Media)

[W}hen the owner of one of those leased parcels decided to work with Acciona Energia to help site its High Point wind and solar farm, Gerlach initially was not enthusiastic.

“The thought of taking productive farm ground out of production with solar panels was not, in my personal opinion, ideal,” he said.

But Gerlach was determined to make the best of the situation.

Ultimately, that meant a win-win arrangement, where Acciona pays him to manage vegetation around the 100 MW array of solar panels that went online in early 2024. Gerlach does that with a herd of 500 sheep.

“We don’t own the land, we don’t get a say — that’s landowners’ rights, and I’m very pro that,” Gerlach recounted. ​“In U.S. agriculture, the biggest thing that gets farmers in trouble is saying ​‘that’s how we’ve always done it so that’s what we’re going to do.’ Renewable energy is probably not going anywhere, whether you’re for or against it, it’s coming, it’s what’s happening. As an agriculture producer, we’re going to adapt with it.”

Immigration

JOBS MAGA WON’T DO:

The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border: If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater (Jack Herrera, November 2024, mTexas Monthly)

For more than a century the threat of arrest—whether by Border Patrol agents in green uniforms or Texas state cops in white Stetsons—has not stopped undocumented workers from moving north. Recently Latin American migrants have kept coming, for the same reason millions of Scots, Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Russians first arrived at Ellis Island. The U.S. economy—the most powerful engine of wealth in human history—has been built on successive waves of foreign-born workers and entrepreneurs. The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally. In a survey conducted this September by another trade group, 77 percent of construction firms with job openings, and 74 percent of those in Texas, reported that they were struggling to fill them.

Film/TV

OTHER THAN DR. NO:

The Ultimate Bond Film Turns 60: “Goldfinger” launched the 007 franchise into global fame—and remains unsurpassed. (Christopher Sandford, September 12, 2024, Modern Age)

First released in the U.K. in September 1964 with a U.S. release to follow in December, the film’s other primary takeaway images are those of a nude young lady killed by being smothered in gold paint, a mute Korean assassin with an unusually lethal bowler hat, and an all-female flying circus, overseen by a blonde-framed vision named Pussy Galore, spraying nerve gas over Fort Knox, all accompanied by a breezily melodramatic title song belted out by Shirley Bassey with the young Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin fame, on guitar.

All rich stuff, you may think, if just a touch on the outré side. The contemporaneous reviews used words like “outlandish,” “ludicrous,” and “absurd, funny, and vile” to describe the film, except for Roger Ebert, who called it “chilling,” and praised Sean Connery—the yardstick by which all his successors as Bond would be measured, often to their disadvantage—for conveying a “verisimilitude” and “sleek assurance” in the role, alongside a gift for deadpan comedy. Revisiting the film years later, Ebert wrote: “Connery . . . had something else that none of [his heirs] could muster: steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.” Connery’s performance surmounted even one or two plot twists and chunks of expository dialogue that may seem a touch heavy-going to us today. The title character’s essential game plan is to profit from the economic chaos that will ensue after he’s detonated an atomic bomb over Fort Knox, thus rendering America’s gold reserves radioactive for a precisely stated fifty-eight years. “He’s quite mad, you know,” Bond remarks to Pussy Galore, just in case anyone watching might have considered it a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

I have to say that I’m with Ebert on this one. It’s not just that Connery is perfect as Bond, with a vitality and a humanity (not to mention that widely mimicked Scottish burr) his inheritors in the role could only approximate, some more competently than others. Strange as it may seem, Goldfinger itself, like many of the author Ian Fleming’s tales, wasn’t pure invention. It was inspired by the swashbuckling exploits of the Anglo-Canadian spymaster William Stephenson (1897–1989), whose wartime scheme to relieve the collaborationist Vichy French government of its bullion reserves held on the island of Martinique had come to Fleming’s attention as a young operative with British naval intelligence.

Republican Liberty

WALLS ARE ANTI-TEXTUAL:

Church and State Unseparated: Why Protestants should take their foundational role in American society seriously again. (David Hein, October 8, 2024, Modern Age)

“What this volume proposes,” Smith writes, “is that the United States Constitution’s disestablishment did not secularize society, nor did it remove institutional Christianity” from the realms of education, law, and politics. That displacement “occurred nearly a century later.”

Informed by both the English Whig and late-eighteenth-century American republican traditions, this voluntarist order, which recognized that religious belief and membership must be the products of the individual’s untrammeled will, was, therefore, liberal in respect of the establishment of religion but conservative in its grasp of the role of Christianity in American society. Smith ably demonstrates how Americans by and large accepted this continuing role for Christian institutions, “perpetuating . . . Christianity through federal and state courts, state colleges and institutions, state legislatures, and executive proclamations from governors and presidents,” as well as “through state cooperation with religious institutions.”

Both church and state, he says, were united in working to achieve a common goal: fostering a moral realm that embraced “historically Christian conceptions of virtue.” The cultural weight of these institutions, which incorporated conservative understandings of ethics and social order, countered irreligious tendencies to moral radicalism. Christians believed that religious faith had a beneficial impact on law, politics, and education. Thus, it warranted the support of civil magistrates. At the same time, Christians believed in religious liberty. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville memorably depicts the benefits of the entanglement of religion and liberty. Unforgettably, too, Samuel Francis Smith highlights these themes in his patriotic hymn “My Country ’tis of Thee.”

Particularly valuable is this volume’s chapter on Thomas Jefferson, who aimed to do more than merely end the privileges of state churches; he also wanted to see Christianity removed from the civil sphere. The author makes it clear that Protestants in the early republic embraced freedom of religion but generally rejected the Sage of Monticello’s wish to remove institutional Christianity’s influence from civic life; they declined to join what Smith calls his “personal war against churchly authority.”

Among the most important spokesmen for religious institutions and their continuing influence were New England Federalists, intellectuals in colleges and universities, and religious and judicial elites: they generally upheld the fundamental role of Protestantism in American culture. Smith points out that they and their like-minded Protestant brethren would have agreed with most of the Framers, who did not endorse a wall of separation between church and state. Many Protestants in the early republic believed that American society needed the efforts of practicing Christians in order to prosper; good Christian men and women fortified the Republic.

At the same time, disestablishment had a positive impact on religion, strengthening Christianity in the public sphere. It prevented an Erastian subordination of the Church to the state. It reduced political interference with religion and avoided the negative reputation that came with state control.

End of History

THE WATER WE SWIM IN:

Slog and Sacrifice: You don’t have to be religious to appreciate what millennia of religion have given us. (Jonah Goldberg, October 4, 2024, The Dispatch)

Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.)

Or take the ideal of “universal brotherhood”—i.e. Equality. It’s a Christian idea flowing straight out of Paul’s exhortation to believers in Christ: “You are all sons of God.” And Paul, a heretical Jew, owed much of his thinking to his religious upbringing. You could argue that the idea of the right to follow your conscience started with Socrates—though given how things ended for him, that’s debatable. But the idea of conscience—conscientious objection to war, civil disobedience, etc.—became a thing thanks to folks like Aquinas and Martin Luther.

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. And remember, God gave us plenty of time to figure this stuff out without Him.

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