This coming Sunday will be the 155th Boat Race. If you find yourself asking, "Which boat race?" please click here. The rest of you know that it is simply the Boat Race, the competition between Oxford and Cambridge, first held in 1829 and annually since 1856 (with the exception of the World Wars), down four and a quarter miles of the River Thames, from the Putney Bridge to the Chiswick Bridge. Cambridge has won 79 of the races, Oxford 74, with one declared a dead heat.
This past weekend the Financial Times had an excellent article on Rebecca Dowbiggin, the Cambridge coxswain. This year's race will be at 3:40pm (British Standard Time), so I might still be at mass while the actual race is happening, but I look forward to watching it online shortly thereafter.
To be honest, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I will, however, be wearing my Caius College tie, in honor of Silas Stafford, a native of Santa Rosa, California, who is studying for an MPhil in Geography at Gonville & Caius and will be rowing stroke for the Cambridge team. I wore that tie the day Caius won their fifth consecutive Lent Bumps, earning them the right to put a bell tower on their boat house, so maybe the tie is lucky. Then again, 1st & 3rd Trinity have won that race every year since then, so maybe it's not.
Below you'll find a video about the Trial Eights, the trial run each school conducts in December.
Special thanks to Barry Arthur Stephen Harding McCain, who gave me the Caius tie.
The other day, while at the cinema to see The Watchmen (my review here), I happened to see this trailer for Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. Anyone notice a problem in the very first shot? I got a nice chuckle...
Just further proof that Dan Brown & Co. are preying on people's ignorance.
I suppose tomorrow is the one day everyone is Irish, so I'll share a couple of my favorite youtube videos of Irish music. Also, a few of you may be aware of my obsession with Irish music, so I'm taking opportunity of today to share some of that obsession.
The first video is of the Bothy Band playing a set of three reels. The Bothy Band was a short-lived but greatly influential band in Ireland. They were essentially responsible for rejuvenating Irish music by adding more modern harmonies and rhythms. They were only together from 1975 to 1979 and only made 4 albums, but their style is still very much alive. Also, after the band broke up, the individual members continued to make great music on their own or in new groups.
The second is a video of Seamus Ennis playing an ancient slow air, called "An Raibh tu ag an gCairrag?" Seamus Ennis was of the generation before the Bothy Band who kept the music alive until the revival in the 1970's. Here he is seen playing the distinctively Irish form of the bagpipes, the uillean pipes, in a much more traditional manner than the first video.
Last night I went to see The Watchmen with some friends. Though I've not read the comic book, I like superhero movies, so I figured I would enjoy it. I left the theater with mixed feelings, but on reflection I've increasingly turned against it.
What didn't you like? you ask. The gratuitous sex and violence are worth a mention (though they're not the biggest issue). In superhero movies, I expect violence. Bad guys get blown up - that's the way it goes. But there were several scenes in The Watchmen that were just plain gratuitous. Not bad guys getting their comeuppance (with awesome special effects), just violence for its own sake. Likewise, sex scenes have become something of a staple of modern populist films. I don't like 'em, but in a certain sense, I can accept them: in the language of modern film, we know the hero and heroine love each other because they have sex. It's a wrong-headed notion, of course, but it often has a plot value. Not so the extended sex scene of The Watchmen: it's just an excuse for several pornographic minutes of actress Malin Åkerman.
**Warning: Spoilers, or elliptical references to them, follow.**
Beyond all that, I found the film's plot and attempt to struggle with moral questions sorely wanting. This is not a standard superhero film with good guys who - in spite, perhaps, of occasional foibles - are clearly good and bad guys who - in spite of occasional moments of charm - are clearly bad. A comparison may illustrate the point: Batman Begins is a film which grapples with the moral ambiguities and difficulties which arise from trying to do good in a world filled with evil. Bruce Wayne/Batman refuses to join the League of Shadows; whereas they see death and destruction as the only answer to a decadent and corrupt society, Wayne believes mankind can be saved. The ends do not justify the means. Justice must be tempered by mercy. I was less satisfied with the sequel, The Dark Knight. It seemed to me the desire to paint moral ambiguities at times overwhelmed the basic struggle of good versus evil. This is most clearly seen at the end of the film, when Wayne convinces Lt. James Gordon, his police sidekick, to blame Harvey Dent/Two-Face's murders on Batman, arguing that the people of Gotham City will lose all hope if they find out the truth about Dent. Batman flees as a fugitive. The painful lesson seems to be that doing good can require falsehood and not just the deception of Bruce Wayne hiding behind a mask, but an inversion of the truth about who has committed good and evil deeds.
Now take that trajectory from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight and follow it several steps further. There you will find The Watchmen. The villain, Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, motivated by a desire to bring peace to the world, kills a few million people and blames it on Jon Osterman/Doctor Manhattan, his former colleague. In the end, his scheme does bring world peace, and no one dares reveal the truth, lest it all be ruined. (We are given a hint at the end that the truth may come out, but through circumstances set in motion before our heroes knew about Veidt's plan.) There is no doubt that Veidt is the bad guy here, and yet... it's hard to hate a man who brings about world peace. One of the subplots mirrors this strange moral ambiguity: Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre reveals to her daughter that the reason she could never bring herself to hate Edward Blake/The Comedian, a man who tried to rape her, is because he fathered her daughter, Laurie Juspezyk/Silk Spectre II. The suggestion is that the means (Blake) justify the ends (Laurie).
Other contradictions and problems abound: Dr. Manhattan, Laurie's boyfriend, becomes increasingly disenchanted with her and humanity generally, though he ultimately defeats Veidt to save mankind. In spite of his conversion of sorts, eventually concluding that life may not be totally worthless, he nevertheless goes into self-imposed exile in the distant reaches of the galaxy, leaving her and everyone else behind. The Comedian is a psycho-killer and a sex-addict. Rorschach, our most morally consistent character, enjoys exacting psychotic revenge on evildoers. Laurie and Daniel Dreiberg/Nite Owl II are happy to take up an affair when her boyfriend - who left his previous love, Janey Slater, for the younger Laurie - grows more distant. These are not model citizens.
However, bad people don't necessarily make for a bad story. Indeed, one of my favorites, Homer's Iliad, is full of bad people. They're part of what make it compelling, actually. So what makes The Iliad different from The Watchmen? The difference, I think, is in the way that the Iliad's plot confronts these problems, whereas The Watchmen's accepts them. The Iliad opens with the problem of Achilles' honor being offended. Does he choose to withdraw from the fighting and protect his personal honor, or does he acknowledge his communal responsibility, continue fighting with the other Greeks and swallow the dishonor? He chooses to sit it out. However, when the Greeks are hard pressed, his sense of communal responsibility kicks in and he tries to paper over the problem by allowing his friend Patroklos to fight in his place. Does this seeming compromise solve the problem? No. That is made painfully clear when Patroklos is killed and Achilles accepts that he should have been fighting (which he promptly resumes). But then the whole question of personal honor versus community responsibility is circumscribed when Priam comes to Achilles to ask for the body of Hektor. Empathy triumphs over rage, providing the peace of mind that neither Achilles nor Priam could heretofore find. At each turn the plot introduces a moral quandary, allows the reader to dwell on it for a time, and then, through the action of the story, shows the consequences of a particular response to that quandary. Moral difficulties are not ignored, they are confronted.
It's been a few years since I read any of Aristotle's Poetics, but as I recall, one of his big points is that the plot must carry a story. You cannot try to describe a character as X, if his actions reveal him to be not X. You cannot say that the moral of the story is Y, if the action reveals it to be not Y. By this standard, the Iliad deserves high marks. The Watchmen, on the other hand, fails. More than just a story of mostly despicable people often doing despicable things, the action of the plot fails to interrogate whether or not these people are exemplary, whether or not they provide a valid window into the nature of reality. That is not only woefully disappointing; it is dangerous.
PS: Intrigued by what Barbara Nicolosi, a respected movie critic, had to say about The Watchmen, I took a look at her review. "WE WALKED OUT. Awful. Disgusting. Degrading. Vile. Barbarous. The kind of entertainment the Roman mobs were watching just before the barbarians came over the walls. Did I say depraved? I meant to. If you let your kids go to this piece of absolute unmitigated garbage, you deserve whatever nightmare lives they end up inflicting on you. I fear I haven't expressed myself strongly enough..." Wow.
Even The Dark Knight didn't get a review that bad, though it wasn't a lot better: "Too Dark. Too long. Too fast. Too pretentious. Too loud. Too many characters. Too much steady cam. Too little substance. Too little fun. The whole world has lost its mind." So I looked up her review of Batman Begins. Far more positive (though not without reservations): "Batman Begins is a very solid movie. It is well-produced, structured for suspense, and incorporates a number of satisfying - if not hugely compelling - characters. It just isn't what you expect it to be as a comic book movie, which might be the kiss of death with the comic book genre fans who want some mystery under their capes. We'll see. I'm giving two bats ears up."
As a conservative, I like tradition. It is, after all, what we are conserving. I freely admit that part of this is simply my love of old-fashioned and aristocratic things. However, there is also a bundle of intellectual arguments, many of them originating with Edmund Burke and repackaged in the 20th century by Russell Kirk, which point out that changes have unintended consequences, that well enough ought to be left alone, that society needs continuity across the generations, etc.
However, this post is not an intellectual defense of conservativism in any of its many permutations. No, this post is about tradition and its place in society. Specifically, how it is transmitted and maintained.
In the Western Civilization course for which I am a teaching assistant, we have been talking recently about the revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (whose arms are pictured above and ethnic regions below) and the reactionaries of the 19th century. It is an interesting period, set in motion when the armies of Revolutionary France rampage all over the Continent, are defeated in Egypt, Spain and Russia and are eventually rolled back to a final defeat at Waterloo. Nevertheless, the revolutionary spirit remains and various revolts and reform movements, many of them liberal or nationalist (or both), crop up throughout the rest of the century.
Conservatives were deeply skeptical of this revolutionary spirit. The teaching authority of the Catholic Church was denied and many of her clergy killed. Some of these men had been involved in various abuses, but by no means all of them. Like the Reformation before it, the French Revolution was not simply about abuses, but was an ideological confrontation with the Church. Likewise, kings were pulled down from their thrones and aristocratic privileges abolished. Again, this was partly a response to abuses, but many representatives of the Old Order were subjected to cruelties entirely at odds with the humanistic ideals espoused by their persecutors.
Be all that as it may, the extent to which revolutions were a response to failures of the Old Order is not what interests me here. Rather, I am interested in the responses of the conservatives in their attempt to retain the hallowed traditions of their respective societies. There were two basic approaches in the 19th century, as there were in the 20th and are today as well. In the first camp you have those who argue that the powers of the state should be used to prop up tradition against revolutionary onslaughts. In the 19th century this meant establishing and subsidizing religion, censoring the press and defending traditional customs by secret police and force of arms. In the second camp, however, we find those who are no less devoted to tradition, but who contend that it must be protected by other means: fostering fervent religion in the home and in the church, promoting traditional values and practices in the cultural sphere, and defending tradition at the ballot box and in the marketplace. There were, of course, many conservatives who fell somewhere in between these two positions, but the basic distinction existed in the 19th century and - in slightly modified form - exists today.
I, for my part, am a proponent of the second camp. It seems to me that when society, as a whole, has abandoned august and valuable customs, the powers of the state - assuming they can be marshaled - can do rather little to enforce the observance of such customs. Those who called for the use of arms to defeat revolutionary agitation were too often guilty of the title given them by their enemies: reactionaries. They had stood idly by while large segments of society forgot the value of tradition and did nothing about it until it was too late. For those interested in conserving the Permanent Things, it must be done each day, and in the bowels of society, not simply in the halls of kings or Congress.
Yesterday, I tried to show that even in our bureaucratic age, we still desire personal authority, whether we realize it or not. Today I want to add just one more observation in connection to a book I recently read.
In Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, the story revolves around the protagonist (K) and his attempt to navigate a village’s labyrinthine bureaucracy so that he can go to work there as a surveyor. The village officials rarely go into the village, usually staying in the castle above the village. Each higher official has hordes of secretaries, many of whom seem to work at cross-purposes to each other. Many of their decisions seem completely arbitrary; letters are written, then stored away for years, and only sent years later after the whole affair has already been cleared up, causing more confusion than there originally was. Interestingly too, these bureaucrats are at times referred to as “the count’s officials,” but nowhere is the count given a name. And most disturbingly, many officials seem to have faces that don’t remain the same. This is literally authority without a face. And yet, the people of the village really seem to love these bureaucrats.
Kafka’s novel is obviously a nightmare about a bureaucracy taking over society, and it might come across to a reader skeptical of my thesis as just a clumsy exaggeration of the bad experience we’ve all had waiting on hold for an hour just to speak with an insurance representative or to an IRS agent. There is some truth in this objection, but there is a fact that most people don’t know: Kafka was a lawyer for an insurance company. Kafka knew the system from the inside. He dealt mostly with workplace accidents and improving safety guidelines for workers. He must have known the hardships—physical and spiritual—faced by a worker who finds himself unable to work and thrown upon the mercy of a bureaucracy. This sympathy with the ordinary individual must be what led K, in The Castle, to exclaim when he was most frustrated by the bureaucracy: “I feel that my very existence is threatened!”
All this is to say: Try telling an injured worker that the delay in his medical treatment is the system’s fault, and he won’t believe you. He needs a person, an authority, to blame (or to praise for resolving the problem). As much as we try to deny it and work our way around it, we can’t change the fact that authority needs to be personal.
Last Friday one of my law school classes took a field trip to the federal Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago to hear oral arguments. The second case of the morning involved a woman who was suing her health insurance company for breach of contract. The key issue was whether the insurance company had actually authorized the surgery. This may sound like an easy factual question to resolve—just look for a letter or some other record—but what made it difficult was the fact that even though the insurance policy seemed to state that it did not cover surgeries related to the woman’s condition, this policy was nearly impossible to decipher, a customer representative gave oral authorization for the surgery in question, and the insurance company had approved a surgery relating to the same condition just a year earlier.
The insurance company’s lawyer tried to make the case that this was an ordinary insurance policy; she even said to the three judges that this 50-page contract was probably just like their health insurance policy. This move backfired, however. All three judges looked rather uncomfortable at this comparison, and one of the judges even asked: “But, counsel, what about the ordinary person reading this contract? Would he know that this procedure wasn’t covered?” From then on, the judges’ questions seemed to indicate that they wanted to rule in the woman’s favor.
This made me wonder about two things. First, these three federal appellate judges appeared not to have read their own health insurance policies. They seemed uneasy—if I may extrapolate a bit from their reactions—with the realization that some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by contracts and regulations which even the finest legal minds in the nation have a hard time understanding. Health insurance, taxes, Social Security, probate, etc., these are all areas of law whose details are nearly incomprehensible to a non-specialist.
Second, lurking behind all this was the question whether a mere customer service representative can speak for the insurance company and whether a patient should rely on that representative’s word. This is a completely natural question for a vast bureaucracy, such as an insurance company or a government agency. When an organization is made up of thousands of people, many of whom do little more than answer phones and look up answers to simple questions on their computers, it’s obvious that not everyone can speak with authority for the entire organization. But, who speaks with authority then?
These two considerations, I would submit, point to the conclusion that one of the main problems with modern bureaucracy lies in the anonymity of authority. Authority is nowhere to be seen. When we deal with authority, we naturally look for a person to exercise that authority. But that’s simply not how the world works today. Rather, today we try to compensate for this lack of personal authority by weaving an ever denser web of contractual and regulatory obligations to give the appearance of authority, but don’t really succeed.
This is not to say that we should breach all our contracts or disregard state and federal regulations. All this means is that in a world of impersonal bureaucracy, supported by impersonal law, we will remain deeply dissatisfied because of the lack of personal authority. Laws and contracts are not enough, and can often make us unhappy, but it’s nearly impossible to rebel against just a law. Rebels and revolutionaries understand this quite well. They don’t fight against abstractions. What did American colonists do to protest the Stamp Act? They went out and tar-and-feathered the first British official they could find. What did they do to protest the taxes on tea? They dumped crates of tea into Boston harbor. Even today, when members of one political party in Congress express their opposition to a particular bill, they denounce “Senator X’s bill” or “President Y’s proposal.” The ad hominem attack may be bad logic, but it’s indispensable to the way people think. Authority needs to be personal.
This coming Sunday will be the 155th Boat Race. If you find yourself asking, "Which boat race?" please click here. The rest of you know that it is simply the Boat Race, the competition between Oxford and Cambridge, first held in 1829 and annually since 1856 (with the exception of the World Wars), down four and a quarter miles of the River Thames, from the Putney Bridge to the Chiswick Bridge. Cambridge has won 79 of the races, Oxford 74, with one declared a dead heat.
