Those who look to the Netherlands as the world’s drug policy bellwether got some disappointing news this month: tobacco may be the wedge that divides pro-legalization liberals and pro-legalization conservatives.  From Reuters:

“Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses. They will be smoke-free,” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told NOS television.

“It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.”

Establishments will not in fact have to be completely smoke-free. Proprietors will be allowed to set up a separate room or glass partition behind which people can smoke, but customers will not be served there to protect staff.

“Employees should not have to work in an environment were they are constantly exposed to the harmful effects of smoking,” Balkenende said after the cabinet’s decision on Friday.

It is legitimate to believe that tobacco’s long-term physical harm outweighs its social benefit, and to believe the same about marijuana’s short-term cognitive harm, but to believe in one and not the other is a perversity of the liberal mind that I had not predicted.

John Cusack wants to be very clear: he doesn’t object to all wars, only this war. That’s fair enough, as is the idea that, if one wants to say that Iraq is unlike any other war in history, one should make a war movie unlike any other.  The problem is that Cusack never succeeds at placing War, Inc. in the war movie genre in the first place, so all of his surreal touches (including, in no particular order, a warlord named Omar Sharif, the line “Get me Katie Couric, Al Jazeera, and a hundred gallons of sheep shit,” and Ben Kingsley’s gestures at a Texas accent) come across as misfires rather than satire.  If a chorus line of amputees had turned up in the middle of a war movie, I would have sat up and taken notice.  As it was, I saw no reason why a movie that, up to that point, had careened from black comedy to screwball to absurdist theater to music video shouldn’t also quote Busby Berkeley.

That being said, I’m willing to take War, Inc. on its own terms in spite of itself.  As far as I can tell, Cusack’s thesis runs something like this: It’s bad enough when war is run by conservatives who, as a matter of ideology, glorify corporations and corporate culture, but to go as far as actually handing the war to corporations is a new and unprecedented level of bad.  For him, it’s not the war; it’s that the war has been outsourced.

Brand Hauser (John Cusack) is not himself the sort of man who would sell his own mother for a bigger market share, but he has come to learn that working for the military-industrial complex means answering to that sort of man on a more or less constant basis.  Trading in second-hand immorality has taken its toll on Hauser—“I feel like some morally inverted, twisted character from a Celine novel”—and so he arrives in “Turaqistan” ripe to fall in love with principled lefty journalist Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), win her heart, overcome a few obstacles, and learn a valuable lesson.

This may be a minor quibble, but, given that the film’s problem with corporate culture is that it rewards ruthless amorality in pursuit of the dubious goal of profit, I’m not sure that it was a good idea to make Hauser’s redeeming angel an investigative reporter.  Journalism, after all, is a profession that rewards ruthless amorality in pursuit of the dubious goal of “getting the story,” and Natalie Hegalhuzen is a journalist through and through, like Clark Gable in It Happened One Night or Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men.  Minutes after Hauser bares his soul to Natalie, she’s on the phone to her editor asking him to “get everything you can on this guy.”  When capitalists betray relationships in order to gratify their selfish desires, at least schools get built.

The bigger problem is that War, Inc. can no more settle on a moral than it can settle on a genre.  Bureaucratized violence is hell, it says, but so is the un-bureaucratized violence of local thugs.  (“Who do I have to shoot to get a drink around here?”)  The American culture that inspired the obscene and vaguely sticky Yonica Babyyeah (Hillary Duff as a Central Asian Britney Spears) is worthless and decadent, but so is the “Turaqi” culture that doesn’t blink at passing a sentence of public mutilation.  If Cusack’s biggest problem is the privatization of war (and it seems from interviews that it is), then why make the centerpiece of the film a “horrors of war” sequence that could just as easily have come at the end of Full Metal Jacket? In the end, the only way to enjoy War, Inc. (and I did enjoy it) is to forget the satirical side completely and think of it as a romantic comedy with an unusual number of explosions.

James Agee panned the 1941 Gregory Peck vehicle Keys of the Kingdom because, as he put it, “it seems a little weak to spend most of your two hours in China in order that those who can’t take their moral conflicts, such as they are, neat can always chase them with something pleasantly exotic.”  By losing track of his political message and turning in a film that’s less Dr. Strangelove and more Grosse Pointe Blank II: Escape to Baghdad, Cusack has fallen into the same trap.

Bramwell’s First Law continues to hold true, and the latest person to hold forth on the nature of conservatism is Atlantic house blogger Ross Douthat:

We tend to take the Kirkian (and, I would submit, ‘70s neoconservative) view that conservatism ought to be inherently anti-ideological, and we view the ideological turn on the American Right—the confusion of policy positions, which by definition ought to be open for debate and alteration, with “moral absolutes” that no true right-winger should deviate from—as a serious problem for conservatism, both in the Bush years and before.

. . . my own (highly provisional) definition of American conservatism would run something like this: A commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements (generally on the left, but sometimes on the right) that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals.

I sympathize with those who want to define conservatism as the rejection of ideology, but, given that the forward march of history can never be stopped, conservatism will only ever be helpful insofar as it can influence its direction as well as its speed.  Those who fail to hitch their conservatism to principle inevitably wind up endorsing something like Michael Oakeshott’s definition of conservatism as that sad feeling you get when your favorite clown dies and sentence themselves to being forever on the losing side of history.

But maybe the losing side of history is where Douthat wants his conservatism to be.  He has earned plaudits from the Left for owning up to American conservatism’s darker moments (“support for segregation…simply was the conservative position in the 1950’s”), but the way that Douthat disowns these past errors is only slightly better than having just ignored them:

. . . liberals were right that the injustice of [segregation] required a deeply un-conservative response, as they have been right (and will be right again) on other points as well. Having conceded this, I would go on to argue that self-identifying as a conservative, under my definition, doesn’t require taking the conservative position on every issue; it merely requires taking the conservative orientation as one’s general approach to politics, and believing that we’ve reached a pass where America’s distinctive “habits, mores and institutions” are more in need of defense then renovation.

The Catholic Church is willing to admit that people outside the faith can be saintly and even holy, but it would be strange to hear the Pope declare that sometimes being ethical requires taking the anti-Catholic position.  To say that there is no conservative case against segregation is like saying that there is no Catholic case against indulgences.  No one believes that conservatism must encompass everything good in the world, but Douthat seems willing to embrace a conservatism that, if applied throughout history, would be wrong as often as right, which raises the question of why he wants to claim loyalty to it at all.  I understand that Douthat’s resistance to change has a lot to do with the culture he wants to preserve at this particular place and time, but if Douthat is a conservative because he likes the American system, he should tell us why he likes it.  His answer to that question probably has more to do with his political orientation than a general impulse to preserve.

Even if you don’t know the name Leon Krier, you may already know his work.  He had a hand in planning Seaside, FL, the town that inspired The Truman Show; most of the movie was filmed there.  More recently, he was tapped by Prince Charles to design Poundbury, a town meant to be a living reincarnation of the ideal British village.

Krier’s motto is “Forward comrades, we must go back!”  How far?  At least a couple of centuries: according to him, “we must begin by rediscovering the forgotten language of the city, which achieved formal perfection in the eighteenth century,” and “recognize the absolute value of the pre-industrial cities, of the cities of stone.” 

It is no surprise that Krier’s reactionary attitude would appeal to Roger Scruton, who wrote a very warm tribute to Krier for the latest City Journal.  To hear Scruton tell it, Krier was one of a handful of architects willing to preach tradition when modernism was having its soulless heyday.  This is essentially true.  On the other hand, if the Right is serious about jettisoning its anti-urbanism—and, in a world where public transport and toll roads are gaining popularity, we have to be—we need to ask whether Krier has anything to recommend him besides the fact that he is not Le Corbusier.

His opponents have accused Krier of being motivated by nothing more than sentimental longing for a romanticized past—I don’t imagine that having the Prince of Wales for a patron has helped much—but I am willing to leave off psychologizing and grant that he understands what he means when he says he wants to undo the Industrial Revolution.  The problem is not that Krier promotes craftsmanship and human-scale living, but that he does so badly.

The changes that would move America towards the kind of human-scale economy that Krier envisions—not pouring so much money into the highway system, removing burdensome regulations that favor the big businesses that can afford to comply with them, keeping a better eye on corrupt municipal governments that court large companies at the expense of their constituents—are outside the purview of a city planner.  There is no reason to expect Krier to hold off planning another city until the revolution comes.  However, papering over these problems by giving towns like Seaside the veneer of self-sufficiency doesn’t just sap these reforms of their urgency; it undermines the very communitarianism that Krier wants to promote.  If the producer is a hundred miles away, what does it matter that I know the local vendor’s name?

In the battle over dense and anonymous downtowns, I am not in Krier’s foxhole.  Having a community of strangers strikes me as theatrical, anarchic, and unusually friendly to self-reinvention; it does not strike me as an oxymoron.  That being said, I am not sure that genuine passion for that small town feel should imply an endorsement of New Urbanism.  Barring a revolution, industrialism is here to stay; given a revolution, the resulting economy will have to be post-, not pre-industrial.  There is nothing wrong with recognizing a demand for small-scale paradises like Seaside and Poundbury.  Krier’s only mistake is in making an ideology of it.

I am not on principle opposed to health.  Some of my best friends are healthy.  Still, for as long as people have (mistakenly) believed that democratic debate can only proceed from those principles everyone shares, people have been excising everything controversial—everything that we actually need to have a democratic conversation about—from the public sphere, and left in only the most innocuous first principles.  At last count, we still had “It’s good to be physically healthy,” “I don’t know about justice, so let’s have fairness,” and “The American flag is pretty boss.”

When the political arena has so few principles to work with, people get unduly zealous about the ones they’ve got; hence the “cult of health,” hence the present epidemic of smoking bans and ridiculous statements about smoking bans (”...waiting two-and-a-half years to enact a smoking ordinance was, from a public health standpoint, unacceptable”).

Even this article, which is more sympathetic to smokers than most of what gets written about us, is so wrapped up the health obsession that it comes to the strange conclusion that smoking is about being unhealthy. (The title of the piece is “It’s about knowing you’ll die.”)  If smoking didn’t kill you, no one would do it?  I rather think everyone would.

Cigarettes are about the camaraderie of a night out, the reverie of a night in, generosity—try asking a stranger for money, then try asking him for a light—and style.  These are slipperier concepts than “health,” but it is still an accepted truth, at least in some circles, that they are more important.  A cultural preoccupation with bodily health can result in some decent high comedy, but it also shortchanges spiritual health, flattens our ability to have real public discussion about when and where smoking should be legal, and robs us of the ability to enjoy small pleasures.

In other words, can Barack please have a cigarette?

No matter what changes the state of California wreaks in the coming months, heterosexual marriage will necessarily preserve two distinctions from any same-sex arrangement: it is the only kind of marriage to involve two people of different sexes, and the only kind that can produce children.  Now that gender has become, like religion, “an innocuous pastime, preferred by a few to golf or canasta,” conservatives have rested the weight of their rhetoric on children.  Of the two, it is the stronger ground, but it has had an unfortunate side effect: the Left gets to talk about True Love, while the Right is left talking about single motherhood and developmental psychology.  The Right has an interest in breaking the Left’s monopoly on soaring Romantic rhetoric when it comes to marriage, but not at the price of consenting to the Left’s claim that marriage is fundamentally about the love between spouses.  Can it be done?

Those who talk disparagingly about the conservative idea that “popping out babies” is marriage’s highest purpose are almost half right.  It’s strange to talk about any kind of love being justified by its usefulness. Marital love is bound—animated—by responsibility and obligation, but that doesn’t mean it is subordinate to any higher utility.  The question “What use is the institution of the family?” makes sense, but “What use is love?” doesn’t, and, for many proponents of gay marriage, it is the love that matters most.  They are, of course, wrong to think so, and any revolution in values that sets their priorities straight would be welcome, but that’s the work of decades and the California initiative is up in November.

There is a danger that engaging with the soft hedonism of love-worship will only legitimize it.  On the other hand, if the mistaken conflation of “loving” and “sacred” can be used to make an argument against gay marriage, then it might be a good idea to make it, if not intellectually then at least tactically.

If marriage comes to be more about being a husband or wife rather being a father or mother, as gay marriage advocates would have it, then spousal love will be glorified—but only at the expense of parental love. Anyone who thinks that marriage is about strong feelings of love should ask which society affirms extravagant love more: one in which an expectation of responsible parenting is part of the structure of marriage, or one in which living up to the difficult ideal of parenthood (and especially fatherhood) is one option among many, and by no means the most appealing one?

The institution of marriage is essentially a pragmatic one, instituted for the sake of public goods like monogamy and family stability. That doesn’t mean that the effects of gay marriage can only be measured in statistics.  Anyone who says “all you need is love” is a fool, but anyone who thinks that it’s gay marriage advocates who are on love’s side is a greater one.

There’s a growing consensus that too many people are walking around with bachelor’s degrees, but is the problem with degree inflation that most people are just too dumb for college?  Charles Murray seems to think so:

The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. [...] There is much more to be said about these harms (and I have said it, in a book that will appear in a few months). For now, it is enough to recognize that educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.

So does Ross Douthat:

. . . we ought to become vastly more flexible in our understanding of what constitutes an ideal post-high school education, and what our high schools should be preparing their students for - which means more vocational education, more shop class as soulcraft, and fewer attempts to pretend that everyone can read Hamlet, or score above the national average on the Math SAT.

This question used to be framed as the choice between Socrates dissatisfied or a fool satisfied.  In the context of the higher education debate, it sounds more like this: Does everyone need a liberal arts education, or are a loving family and honest work enough for most people?  Is critical thinking about big questions properly understood as a pastime of the elite?

On these questions, Murray and Douthat have picked the wrong misconception to attack.  The modern mistake isn’t in thinking that every man needs some way to exercise his intellect; every man does, whether he reads Dickens for pleasure or not.  The real error is in thinking that a liberal arts education is the only way to cultivate a philosophical mind.  When the anonymous author of “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” complains that his students don’t understand that “[r]eading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas,” can he be sure that it’s the “acquaintance with profound ideas” that they disdain and not just his favored path to it?

Some forms of low art don’t have any intellectual content, but there’s a lot of middle ground between dance music on one hand and Shakespeare on the other.  A man who has an opinion about Humphrey Bogart has given serious thought to existentialism, even if he didn’t know to call it that.  You don’t have to deconstruct James Bond and Indiana Jones to see that, if both of them are “heroes,” heroism has to be something complicated.  If you have a working knowledge of “cheatin’ songs,” you’ve confronted the power of the flesh over good sense, the perversely noble stoicism of the sacrifices that adulterous couples make, and the way that infidelity destabilizes a marriage in ways that the guilty party could never have foreseen.  A lifetime with George Jones is as educational as four years with Wittgenstein.

Speaking as someone whose undergraduate years are not far behind her, my guess is that the real problem with demanding a B.A. of every white collar worker isn’t that it makes the intellectual demands of economic advancement too high, but that it forces too many people to undergo something that is more of a middle- and upper-class rite of passage than a real education. Still, even if higher education did exactly what it said on the tin, it would still be condescending for liberals to think that everyone is meant for the college track, and it would still be a mistake for conservatives like Murray and Douthat to imply that “not meant for college” and “too dumb to think philosophically” are synonymous.

Imagine a pair of people, the first of whom is, by any standard you could want to pick, better than the second—not an unimaginable scenario.  In such a case, most people wouldn’t have a problem saying, “If B became as smart as A, or as kind, or as pretty, or as industrious, etc., it would be a good development”; on the other hand, few would go so far as to say that it would be better for B to become A.  Self-improvement is, in some literal sense, a betrayal of who-I-am-right-now, but it doesn’t offend our belief in the inherent worth of every human person.  Saying that we would prefer a world in which there were two A’s rather than an A and a B, on the other hand, does.

Pinker seems to think that bioethical “dignity” talk is just a cover for “skittishness toward biomedical advances.”  He’s right that the Yuck Factor is certainly a big part of it, but if “Become someone better, but don’t become someone else” is a maxim—admittedly a slippery one—that we’re willing to apply to individual people, why not apply it to the human race?

In the seventies, when the activist Left was calling marriage a form of soft slavery and rallying behind no-fault divorce, conservatives very cannily played feminism against itself, making the argument that weakening marriage would be bad for women.  (It was.)  As gay marriage becomes more and more of a live option, conservatives can, I think, get analogous mileage out of using queer theory in the argument against gay marriage.

Queer theorists have spent decades’ worth of time and ink defending the idea that homosexuality is its own kind of love with its own mythology, rules, virtues and pitfalls, rather than a defective form of heterosexual love, a variation on the natural and normal.  In the fight for the language of difference over the language of defect, any attempt to apply the deeply gendered terms of marriage to homosexuality would be a step backwards. 

When erotic metaphors pop up in the Western canon, they aren’t always gendered—I’m thinking in particular of the Greek idea of pedagogy, Romantic analogies between erotic desire and artistic appreciation, and even Freudian Eros and Thanatos.  On the other hand, marriage metaphors, from Israel-as-adulterous-bride in the Old Testament to the Christian motif of Christ-as-bridegroom, have always depended on one party being the husband and one being the wife.  (This doesn’t mean that the tradition of marriage couldn’t become ungendered, only that it would be radically revolutionary to do so; there are separate arguments for why such a development would be a bad idea, including but not limited to the fact that making romantic love’s definitive institution “unisex” would make an exclusive preference for men seem about as meaningful an exclusive preference for blondes.)

Committed homosexual relationships will always exist—if there’s one thing conservatives can learn from people like John Boswell and George Chauncey, it’s that the gay community will never disappear; if there’s another, it’s that even those of us who hold to orthodox Christian views on the matter of homosexuality shouldn’t necessarily want it to—but trying to shoehorn these relationships into one of the most heteronormative institutions ever invented would only be a setback for anyone who prefers to think of homosexuality as a perfect version of itself rather than an imperfect version of something else.

There was a moment in the tumultuous wake of Juno, Waitress, and Knocked Up when it looked like the abortion movie was going to become a genre. Fortunately, it seems that Hollywood’s interest in pregnancy has expanded, and we are now in the season of the “fertility film” (Baby Mama, Smart People, Then She Found Me).  This is good news for the conservative movie-goer for whom the question “Should I carry my baby to term?” is far less interesting than “What happens to my world when I do?”

If conservatives are happy, there’s money to be won betting that someone at Mother Jones isn’t, and in this case it’s Alissa Quart, who wonders if such an unequivocally rosy view of motherhood is good for women:

. . . the truth is that these films are rather conservative at heart; their entanglements all end far more neatly than their real life counterparts. Teen Juno’s existence fractures into ironic shards with her surrogacy, true, but then Juno gives her infant to an elegant single mom for adoption and all is well. In her fertility film, Helen Hunt’s later life motherhood may have led to uncomfortable issues about biological kinship, but these disruptions are then corrected by motherhood. Same goes for Parker in hers, where her strange romance is relieved of its indie-film angst by the birth of twins. [...] All of these films end with a love object, a baby that is superior in the eyes of many women than a man would be. In these films, the baby represents eternity and the possibility of absolute devotion. It’s a relationship that, unlike romantic love or marriage, female viewers are thought to believe in without sarcasm.

I’m not sure why Quart is unhappy about the move towards seeing mother- and fatherhood as redemptive, given that it moves us away from trying to charge romantic relationships with the burden of making overgrown adolescents man up (which was always a bad bet on our part).  Movies are full of men who start out juvenile, sullen, self-absorbed, or humorless, only to fall into relationships with women who offer a promise of salvation.  I’m not sure why; confrontation with the responsibilities of fatherhood seems to have more raw valence than “love of a good woman.”

Take Smart People, one of Quart’s “fertility flicks”: when Dennis Quaid finally decides that he’s ready to grow up, he signals his maturity by asking Sarah Jessica Parker to take him back.  In an uncharitable reading, he’s now saddled her with the responsibility of building a romantic relationship magical enough to save his soul.  At best, she’s the merit badge he gets for his redemption.

This is why the rise of the “fertility flick” is a good thing.  No matter how much of a long shot it was, getting the girl isn’t miraculous enough to redeem anyone.  Is Hollywood beginning to recognize that participating in the creation of a new life might be?