Freespace

Talking with Armstrong & Getty about the Olympics, the 1619 Project, gun rights, vaccine requirements, etc.

Quite a potpurri of subjects this morning as I talked with Jack Armstrong about everything from the charlatanism of Nikole Hannah-Jones to the right of property owners to require people to have vaccines before going on their land. If you missed it, you can listen here.

How much does aesthetic appraisal depend on outside facts?

In the question and answer portion of my TOS-Con presentation on John Singer Sargent, I was asked a particularly interesting question, one that’s stuck with me because I’m not entirely happy with the way I answered it. The question was: to what degree is it necessary to understand the historical or biographical context of an artwork in order to fully grasp its aesthetic merit? Does a work stand on its own? Or do we need to know stuff outside the canvas?

I suppose the question was inspired by my opinion of Sargent’s Madame X, which is probably his most famous painting, and which he called “the best thing I have done,” but which I do not particularly like. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a marvelous example of Sargent’s brilliant skill, but I consider it not his best portrait, and in fact, as I explain here, not really a portrait at all. It’s a piece of social commentary, and one that—whatever its appeal in the 1880s—is now a bit off-putting.

But that’s not at issue here. The question—to what degree does an artwork stand on its own—is a solid one. It’s one that has dogged not just aesthetic theory, but other things, as well. In theology, there’s the longstanding dispute between the Protestant position of sola scriptura and the Catholic view that tradition and elaboration are legitimate parts of the Christian tradition. In law, there’s the dispute over Originalism versus the Living Constitution—where the latter position says that the meaning of the law may not be represented exclusively by the text. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, obviously, since even Originalists will appeal to positions outside the four corners of the document to interpret it, but I think the point remains valid.) In the early 20th Century, there was the dispute in literature between the New Criticism—which said the text should stand entirely on its own—and other crucial positions which examined a work in the context of its age and circumstances and the life experiences of its author.

I’ve never been persuaded of the New Critical position. Yet that isn’t to say that a work’s social and cultural context plays no role. I think if you read a book like, say, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it’s a superb aesthetic experience—but not until you learn that Conrad actually went to the Congo, and actually rode up the river on a steamer, and based a lot of the novel on actual things that he saw, can you fully appreciate what he was saying.

What I wish I had emphasized more in my answer was that this does not detract from the aesthetic position that holds that an artwork should stand on its own.

Why you can't be just "a little bit socialist"

A few days ago I talked with my friends Armstrong and Getty about why socialism tends inherently toward totalitarianism. I mentioned Ludwig von Mises's classic explanation of how if you try to control the price of butter, you inevitably have to control the price of everything else. We also talked about law and courts and stuff like that there. If you missed it, you can listen here.

And don't miss this excellent tidbit from Anthony de Jasay:

Socialism in its undiluted, genuine version implies a command economy. There is nothing pejorative in this term: it is factually descriptive. It means that all significant production and distribution decisions are taken by “social choice” and backed by the sovereign power vested in it. They are broken down by central planning into detailed instructions concerning factor inputs, product outputs, incomes, and prices. The instructions are meant to be coherent and capable of being executed by agents of “society” from managers down to workers. Coherence ex ante, if it is achieved, does not secure coherence ex post, because the system is necessarily rigid yet exposed to random shocks, shortfalls, and stoppages. Any variable not subject to a specific instruction or target backed by adequate sanctions, has a natural propensity to follow the line of least resistance and take on the “wrong” value; inputs, prices, wages, and investment expenditures will be too high for given outputs, outputs will be too low for given inputs, labor productivity too low for a given equipment, quality too low for a given price, and so on. This tendency necessitates an ever finer breakdown of targets and constraints, and runs counter to attempts at simplifying and decentralizing the system by one ingenious reform after another. The agents of the political authority owe it obedience, but the more exacting are their orders and the greater is their complexity, the stronger will be the likelihood of laxism in execution and dissimulation of failures. For these and other reasons, the nature of the genuinely socialist economic mechanism demands severe enforcement in order to perform anywhere near as intended—yet severe enforcement is costly. However, the innocent belief that the corresponding “Stalinist” features of socialist systems are merely residual effects of the personal proclivities of the individual of the same name, seems nevertheless ineradicable from much public discourse.

Talking with John Stossel & John McWhorter about the politicized language of "wokeness"

In the latest episode of Stossel TV, I sat down with John Stossel to talk about politicized language in today's "woke" environment. 

I didn't have time to get into detail about what I mean when I say the only alternative to language is power. But I addressed it more in my chapter in 1984 and Philosophy and in this talk at Pacific Union College last year. 

My review of Max Hastings' new book Operation Pedestal

...is now available at The Objective Standard. I've praised Hastings many times before, and his latest book is no exception to his usual excellence. Excerpt:

Hastings details the violence and valor of that week with all the elegance for which he is famous. As the author of a dozen books on World War II, as well as volumes on World War I and the Korean, Vietnam, and Falklands wars, Hastings has earned a reputation as a master of concise and dramatic prose, whose trademark is a seamless blend of scholarly analysis and vivid details drawn from interviews from those who experienced the conflict firsthand. The result is a history at once objective and sympathetic, written with a profound respect for the men—many of them civilians—who faced such immense peril. Consider his description of one of the most horrific moments of the journey, when the merchant vessel Waimarama, the convoy’s largest ship, was struck by Italian and German planes on August 13, 1942:

The first aircraft, facing a storm of flak, bombed wide. The second, however, hit the hapless cargo-liner four times. . . . A stupendous explosion followed, as Waimarama’s eleven thousand tons of munitions and fuel blew up with a force that destroyed the next attacking aircraft, killed eighty-three men on the ship and sent debris soaring hundreds of feet into the air and across the sea—fragments caused casualties and superficial damage on Rochester Castle, half a mile away. . . . [Another ship, Melbourne Star,] was just four hundred yards astern when the explosion came. A great shower of debris, some of it flaming and including shards of steel plating five feet long, rained down, hammering and clattering on decking and superstructure. The base of a ventilator smashed into a machine-gun position, wrecking the weapon and shocking its gunner. Next day [Captain] David MacFarlane discovered an unexploded six-inch shell, blown from the lost ship, embedded in a bulkhead above his own cabin. . . . As Melbourne Star bore down on the stretch of fiery sea, from his post high on the monkey island the Master ordered hard aport, but the ship could not change course swiftly enough to escape. MacFarlane then embraced his only other expedient—to make the vessel’s ordeal by fire as brief as possible. He called to Second Officer Bill Richards in the wheelhouse for full speed. . . . Wooden lifeboats, hanging out from both sides of the ship, were scorched and charred; much of Melbourne Star’s paint was blistered away. . . .Then yet another German aircraft descended.

Read the rest...