My charitable ode to (Hegelian) conservatism

The feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that others have felt the exact same emotions before, whether about everything from ambition and compassion to Hegel's great philosophical contemplations of human dependency, is staggering. Rather than receding into anonymity, we thenceforward can act with the belief that our actions are significant - we are freed from individuality in the petty details to launch our own independent projects within it. When you are alone in the world, any new start can seem overwhelming; but if you are simply following a long-traveled trail that you know has led to some goods, your eyes are more peeled for the more efficient shortcut or the more illuminating detour; even a new destination is no longer beyond question.

But the sense of history is also not one to be dismissed: it is the home of empathy and emotional resonance. When we watch a movie Apollo 13, it carries emotional resonance because it is not just a random team of explorers, but the culmination of long efforts to reach beyond the human condition, part of the human project. When someone recites the Gettysburg Address, it can bring some to tears and everyone to chills because we recognize the significance bestowed on it by everything that had preceded it, the mindset that spawned it. Perhaps more importantly, we understand how it would have affected so many people in the future with certain values.

Of course, from the liberal standpoint, we cannot take that emotional resonance as a bearer of truth. Humans can be easily swayed by a force of history (and the weight of human numbers, essentially) behind something that may only be contingent. For example, it is unclear to me that the Civil War really did most perfectly uphold the values of democracy and peace that Lincoln espoused in his battlefield speech. And I think this is the chief danger, even a Nietzschean one: that the old way is not necessarily the most perfect way. Sometimes it is hard to part with that historical association, but we must realize that new histories may be better ones.

The Collegiate Bureaucracy

So the students milling about Yale at any given time strike me as amazingly part of the bureaucratic machine that I've been reading about in Weber and from the Frankfurt School. One of the central premises of this school of thought about "bureaucratic rationalization" is that modern society creates a number of bureaucratic machines that, due to increasing education, have been hyper-rationalized and organized from above, carving exact roles for members of the society to fill (Sartre would roll in his grave over inauthenticity); to reason externally, to evaluate whether or not these are themselves worthwhile, would be to overthink the system. And this is not a mere matter of doublethink, because indeed these pre-determined roles (five-classes-and-three-recommendations-per-semester, two-internships-for-summer, one-extracurricular-with-at-least-one-leadership-role, two-scholarships-and-a-few-applications-for-law-school-with-backups ones sounds familiar?) actually do guarantee us individual success within public opinion and (sometimes) are genuinely socially utile. But the problem is, are they our roles? Now if only we had a few weeks or hours or minutes to contemplate that question... The frightening thing is that most of us haven't, because we can't spare those thirty minutes for one of the biggest questions of our lives.

For example, until I was a senior in high school, I couldn't multiply by multiples of ten efficiently. I had to visually inscribe the product in my thoughts, carrying the zeros and adding the resulting rows; but I knew there is a simple decimal rule that would reduce this amount by ten seconds. The problem is that I knew it would take me at least a minute to figure this out and it took me no more than fifteen seconds to do long multiplication in my head. It took me four years to "get around" to the decimal rule.

I've realized that I absolutely must go into political science. There's something about reading Peter Heather that actually makes my skin crawl, realizing that the Romans were able to spread the pride in Roman culture to such an immense empire - to the point that barbarians were literally begging - with voluntary taxes, tribute, and home-financed monuments - to join the club. It's this type of analysis of societal phenomena that truly energizes me.

Is this not an item on the syllabus of one component of the five-and-three-per-semester scheme? (By the way, tribute to Perry Link for the best self-referential conclusion in a New York Times Review article).

Not so radical hope

Today I read Charles Taylor's Article in the New York Review of Books entitled, Radical Hope," in which he describes the potential for a society whose central tenets have been undermined by globalization/modernization to find another motivating value and meaning for itself, whereby all its cultural actions will regain significance. But he seems to assume that cultures as coherent groups need to continue within a blood-defined set of individuals, even if the basis of their culture, what was significant, is gone. This is a blatant admission that cultures are arbitrarily formed, that what they deem as significant is in fact no more than pluralistically tolerable.

Sharma no doubt wanted us to read this piece as it indicates how war can define a culture's hierarchy and social structure. The Crow Amerindian tribe developed a ranking system based on performance in battle, and a culture around honoring these deeds and those of high rank.

I really just feel like Horkheimer and Adorno are just afraid of losing mysticism, of learning that we really all are just a unique combination of very definable, empirical qualities.