“just shut up”

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Joel

I happen to be a big fan of Andrew Klavan, both as a playwright and, more recently, as a political thinker and philosopher of sorts. My first introduction to Klavan was in the form of an article he write for the Wall Street Journal discussing the war on terror. He is a brilliant communicator and possesses a sense of perspective I attribute solely to those who have experienced a true conversion or transformation — which, in his case, happened to be both religious and political. (His interview with Peter Robinson seems to evidence this perspective quite convincingly, in my opinion)

In short, I have a great deal of respect for this man and usually walk away from his work feeling somewhat enlightened. I say “usually” because I was initially somewhat disappointed with his recent video series he is doing at pajamastv.com titled “Klavan on the Culture”.

Click image to view video

Here is a makeshift (but reasonably accurate) transcript of the relevant portion I wish to discuss… wherein Klavan says:

“I’d like to explain the Liberal argument. SHUT UP. ‘Shut up’ is the central rationale behind the leftist program… but even if the left can’t turn ‘shut up’ into law… they’ve worked hard over the years to make it the custom of the country. Its the essence of politically correct phraseology and university speech codes. Say it our way or ‘shut up’. Its inherent in the media’s demonization of conservative commentators… the way they try to turn names like Limbaugh and Coulter into bywords for intolerance so they’ll just ‘shut up’…

His basic point was that the left has a habit of using personal attacks and political correctness to tarnish the reputations of their political opponents than engage them in real debate. The left tries to turn conservatism into a pariah of sorts… implying that any opposition to liberal policies is because of some underlying racist, bigoted, or sexist motive… in an attempt to shame them into silence. In fact, we are seeing this right now with the nomination of Judge Sotomayor… you can’t turn on the TV without hearing a lecture about how improper it would be for Republicans to oppose the first female, Latina court nominee.

Now, it is not that I disagree with Klavan, but I was really disappointed in the way he made the point. I was very skeptical and unimpressed with the simplistic explanation he offered… Liberals just say “SHUT UP” — as if most of them are mentally incapable of having a civilized discussion. Not only does this not match my own personal experience but I find it to be unnecessarily contentious and, well, rude. “This is simply an inaccurate description of the left,” I thought to myself.

But then something caught my eye on Facebook, of all places. I discovered that a liberal aquaintance of mine… a quite pleasant and reasonable woman from all appearances, had joined a group that wants “Dick Cheney to shut the hell up” (it is currently 185,000 members strong… and growning… a quick search for similar anti-Pelosi groups turned up at most 100 people). “This can’t really be what I think it is”, I thought to myself. “Is this really a group on facebook?” I was temporarily speechless. And then it dawned on me… Maybe Klavan was on to something… Maybe he was telling the truth after all…

What do you all think? Can you provide any current examples of this ‘SHUT UP’ mentality? Feel free to support or criticize this post in the comments section… I’d be happy to argue!

The Amazing power of the LAW

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Joel

Wow, I really wish I would have read a piece like this before going to lawschool. I never looked at the law as an intrusion into religious and personal reality before. Very interesting, albeit disturbing.

What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.

If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute…

When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody’s marriage. Now the happily, romantically married may not notice this in practice. But not only the bad marriages, but the so-so marriages, the good-enough marriages were and are profoundly affected by the law — not only directly, but by the cultural changes in the public understanding of marriage that the law only partly caused and but certainly reinforced and institutionalized.

If you have a right to divorce at will, what you lose is the right to make an enduring marriage — at least if you live in consensual (shared) reality.

I can still hold the view that divorce is wrong — that I have no right to divorce because I made a vow to stay married. But with the advent of unilateral divorce, my views became a privatized view of marriage, not part of the shared reality defined by the law. We privatized this view of marriage precisely when the law privileged the progressive view of divorce.

Maybe you think this was a good change. I will not stop to argue the point now. What I’m trying to point to (for those geniuinely striving but challenged to understand my argument) is that the law mattered. And that the consequences of this legal change was not, in a simple sense, the expansion of liberty, but a change in power, driven in significant part by the cultural power of the law’s power to name reality…

So yes, if you follow the analogy to divorce, parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.

When people say the “law is an educator,” that’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?

The law’s power to name reality matters.

via The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 3) – Maggie Gallagher – The Corner on National Review Online.

“Little Wolfgangerl”

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Joel

Music is one of the most important things… in life (certainly in my life anyway). I prefer Bach… particularly any solo piano work such as his “Inventions and Sinfonias”, Gouldberg Variations, etc… but there is something so intoxicating about Mozart–his slow, effortless melodies, driving rhythms… so I couldn’t help but read this article off www.aldaily.com (arts & letters daily) about the genius of Mozart. (click image for article)

But hard work notwithstanding, little “Wolfgangerl” was spectacularly precocious, spending hours at the keyboard at three and composing at four or five. Reported a contemporary English observer of the boy’s ability simply to sight-read:

“Suppose, then, a capital speech in Shakespeare never seen before, and yet read by a child of eight years old, with all the pathetic energy of Garrick. Let it be conceived likewise, that the same child is reading, with a glance of his eye, three different comments on this speech tending to its illustration; and that one comment is written in Greek, the second in Hebrew, and the third in Etruscan characters?¢‚Ç¨¬¶ . When all this is conceived, it will convey some idea of what this boy was capable of.”

Can you imagine? I cannot conceive how a mind could work like that.