Stephen Cohen has an excellent, urgent column in the IHT on the topic of McCain and Obama’s totally inadequate and positively harmful Russia policies. I have nothing to add for now that I haven’t said before; Russia is the most important country in the world as far as American foreign policy is concerned. With Russia on our side, all our problems are manageable. With Russia against us, managing our problems becomes impossible.

Obviously Russia isn’t going to become a Stalwart Ally anytime soon. But we don’t need any more of those anyway. We just need a Respectful Friend. And we’re only going to get as we give. This may be annoying, for any number of reasons, but the rewards are immeasurable.

And I’m just stupid enough to think that the Russians would actually prefer this, too — so much so that if we recalibrated our policy accordingly, they wouldn’t double-cross us.

Here’s a horrible idea:

Justice Kennedy, for example, could simply write, “I agree with many of the arguments by four of my colleagues that statute X is unconstitutional, but I do not believe we as a court should overturn the considered and democratically accountable wisdom of Congress without more consensus.”

In the name of judicial restraint, I, Justice Me, hereby decline to rule on a case according to its constitutionality! Judicial activism is a function of the politicizing of the judiciary function. So concerned with practicality, the logic to this nightmarish plan (put forth by Jed Shugerman, Harvard Law professor…duh), has the practical effect of a rabbit-punch to Blind Justice’s gut a gut punch to the blind rabbit of Justice.*

Strangely, I heard about this from Ross Douthat — who is usually so measured and sound about stuff that his support for this kind of blatant judicial legislating leaves me flummoxed and flabbergasted! Substantive judicial legislating, where the motions of the rule of law are gone through cleverly enough to produce the outcome one wanted from the beginning, is bad enough. But this procedural judicial legislating, where the outcome desired is actually to abandon jurisprudence as the means to arriving at a decision, is just shameless. I’m not sure I can think of a more damaging course of action to the legitimacy and authority of the Court. See O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which in a fatal irony reinforced the principle it condemned:

Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals. If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined, then, so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals. The Court’s concern with legitimacy is not for the sake of the Court but for the sake of the Nation to which it is responsible.

The Court’s duty in the present case is clear. In 1973, it confronted the already divisive issue of governmental power to limit personal choice to undergo abortion, for which it provided a new resolution based on the due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Whether or not a new social consensus is developing on that issue, its divisiveness is no less today than in 1973, and pressure to overrule the decision, like pressure to retain it, has grown only moreintense. A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.

So in order to convince the American people that the Court was not just making a decision based on what the American people wanted it to be, the Court would decide in accordance with what some decisive portion of the American people expected the decision to be. A painful predicament. If anything, making this tortured process into a celebrated first priority will probably result in more plurality opinions, not more majority ones, and at any rate a vast new body of what I’d be inclined to call anti-constitutional law.

* Edit courtesy Matt Frost.

That’s liberal/progressive blogger Brian Beutler, apparently, who had his spleen vented for him in the unsatisfying sense by some contemptible little bastard on the wrong side of Adams Morgan. I don’t know Brian, but many people do, and along with them I send a prayer and a burst of healing cosmic energy. Also, since Brian is unbreakable, and we haven’t the satisfaction of a perp in the clink, we can fight back with big laughs. Ezra’s graph is a classic that cuts in both directions:

As you can clearly see, post-Heller, the number of friends shot in DC has skyrocketed eight bazillion percent, dodecatupling in size by infinity orders of magnitude.

Now, to be serious: I recognize that Heller looks like a real unfunny joke under circumstances like these, and the point of Ezra’s graph is to convey this in deadly humorous terms. Actually, if I had to identify the root of the problem that spawned Heller, it would be the District of Columbia itself, which, as a stateless city, ought not exist. Heller is an externality of our most peculiar institution, American federalism. Under the circumstances, the best thing to do is certainly to recognize the Second Amendment for what Scalia says it says and proceed to regulate guns in DC as tightly as constitutionally imaginable.

As for Brian’s pathetic assailant (someone refuses to give you their cell phone and you shoot them?), when I first heard this story I barked out a pretty spiteful line: “Clearly what that guy needs is more access to educational opportunities.” I was fairly quickly corrected by my good company — point is, he needed them and didn’t get them, and now look. But that can be true while the truth of his unqualified responsibility for shooting up recalcitrant mugees remains in force. I wish it were as easy to supply good educational opportunities as it is to punish someone for armed assault, especially in poor stateless DC.

Yeah, these are somewhat jangled thoughts, but I think that reflects pretty well the facts of the matter.

A lot of spluttering is taking place over the possibility certainty that Barack Obama is a ‘Christianist’ of some kind or another: see Rod (II), Daniel, Ross, Andrew (II), Ambinder. Sure enough, Andrew walked right into this one and has smartly admitted it very swiftly. Daniel seems for a minute to have the last word:

The rule seems to be something like this: the less orthodox or traditional the religion or church, the more acceptable its “interference” in political life.

Surely nothing could be more -ismatic than conservative Christians and liberal Christians arguing over who the real Christianists are, and I have a sinking suspicion this is where we’re headed. (Conservative talk radio host: “now, Barack Obama is trying to force his version of Christianity on your children!) But Daniel’s remark is meant to suggest that the ‘rule’ he describes is illegitimate and indefensible. Unfortunately, this is not quite as true as I’d like it to be.

There’s a robust argument to be made that ‘progressive’ or whatever Christianity truly does play a more acceptable, even interfering, role in public political life in a country like ours. I don’t like this argument, and I can fight back against it, too, but it goes something like this:

Our political objectives are good ones, but they don’t and can’t stand on their own. They need the support of moral and even religious principles. They probably even need to derive from shared moral and religious principles. We can cope fairly well politically with a certain amount of diversity of interest among our citizens — even incommensurable interest. But it hinders the healthy functioning of our political order when people with profoundly different faiths, principles, or comprehensive doctrines struggle over which receive public privilege. Regardless of which faith wins out, there’s an inherent good to the dominant, common, popular faith supplying our political regime with the foundational supports it needs to succeed.

That’s the abstract version. You could plug in your favorite religion and feel pretty good about it. But here’s the detailed version:

Our political objectives — the minimization of agony, the rejection of cruelty, the protection of the least among us, the promotion of free equality, and the solidarity of community and government — are good ones, but they don’t and can’t stand on their own. They need the support of moral and even religious principles that explain to us why it’s our duty to God and to one another to want to attain these objectives. Since our political objectives derive from our moral and religious faith, the ends of that faith make of politics a means to their realization. Because we’re a free people we allow politics to meander a bit, but when it produces or reinforces unjust outcomes, our faith prompts us rightly to step in and correct them. We can cope fairly well politically with a certain amount of diversity of interest among our citizens — even incommensurable interest. But it hinders the healthy functioning of our political order when conservative Christians whose strict, traditional mores are being abandoned by increasing numbers of people seek to embed their dying faith in public law. Christianity has developed into a vibrant new vision of loving togetherness that more truly captures the calling of Christ than condemnation and marginalization. But religious truth is not enough. What matters is that this new Christianity is more deeply consonant with our central political objectives and commitments than the old Christianity. And since this is so, there’s an inherent good to including that faith integrally and intimately in the practice of our politics.

Clearly this is something of a chicken-and-egg problem. At its heart is the question of just how much our political objectives ought to, or do, derive from our moral and religious ones. The problem facing liberals is that liberal Christianity all too often is considered just one component of, or pathway to, the liberal humanist conception of social justice. Conservatives rarely, if ever, face that problem. The dilemma facing liberal Christians is whether they are willing to go along with the social justice ride as mere means to a humanist end. The resolution to this dilemma that I see approaching involves steadily transforming Christianity, especially Catholicism, into a mystical love cult of social solidarity and all-embracing nonjudgmentalism — a big mass of equals at the bottom led by a small hierarchy of Knowers at the top. This religious soft despotism will combine nicely with the political soft despotism that liberals long for.

In short, the way liberal Christians can avoid the (accurate) charge of ‘Christianism’ is by transforming their faith into a means serving secular human ends. But exactly this transformation is what makes it most consonant of all with liberal politics, blurring the line between public and private and between faith and policy; under those circumstances, conservatives — religious and political — face real trouble. But the alternative is a protracted round of name-calling, with ‘Christianist’ becoming an all-purpose epithet like ‘Un-American.’

Of course there’s a third alternative, which is to permit a gap between the outcomes we call politically just and the outcomes we call socially or morally good. But can anyone really tolerate this anymore?

Well this is embarrassing:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Conservatives have long supported the Bush administration on coercive interrogation, with some even defending the selective use of torture. After some torturous contemplation of my own, some time ago I determined that waterboarding was not torture at one (maybe two) dunks but definitely torture at ten (and maybe four) dunks. Raising the question of whether clearly not-torturous waterboarding was of any real use to us. And that set me down a road culminating in a total rejection of torture as an instrument of interrogation. (Although I still interpret torture narrowly. The key is repetition and duration.)

But that’s all fairly academic stuff when stacked up against our rote repetition of shoddy Communist Chinese interrogation rules. If there’s anything that embarrasses conservatives, it ought to be taking cues from Red China at the peak of its anti-American brutality. True enough, our post-9/11 situation is different from their mid-Korean War situation. The trouble is that the outcomes ought not to be the same — a lot of time wasted brutalizing people for all too little gain. We are meant to believe that the gain, in our case, has been small but very significant — new terrorist attacks prevented and so on. And maybe so. But with so many people in Gitmo, not to mention whatever offsite facilities are still in operation, we the people have effectively no ability to judge on our own conscience whether whatever’s going down is worth it. This is a problem that must be corrected.

Imagine if we went public with the number of people being harshly interrogated and the level of severity involved. It might be that the American people would be revolted and demand a stop to the practice, damn the dirty torpedoes. But it might be that there are really only five or ten people in the whole world who it’s worth interrogating severely/coercing/torturing. And if that’s the number, I bet the American people say to themselves “Well, that’s horrible, but worth it.” Regardless, what we want to avoid is a situation in which we are torturing people to find out whether or not it’s worth torturing them.

Sadly, I expect this is exactly the sort of wiggle room that the administration wants. Despite our valid concerns about what secrets practicing terrorists might hold, we should be so unhappy about following in communist China’s footsteps that we’ll change our policy out of pride as well as shame. It’s important to remember that we can and should refrain from doing some things to some people because we want to refrain, not because we have to.

UPDATE: Hitchens’ firsthand account of waterboarding — he volunteered for a second round — seems to vindicate my comments above, if only in the most (appropriately) ungenerous terms. And again the mind reels at seeing this material between the sylph-draped covers of Vanity Fair. Anyway, this seems to me the clincher:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

Torture is not — bear with me as I try this thought on for size — evil simply because suffering is inflicted. It is evil because it creates a sadomasochistic relationship out of the suffering (and in an incredibly short period of time, too). It lowers torturer and tortured, and the conveyance of that lowering is their relationship. It’s particularly horrifying to us that this relationship is involuntary. But it needn’t be.

Ross asks if the iPhone is making us stupid.

[Walter] Mossberg delivered this assessment [at the Aspen Ideas Festival] with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (”people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer” - a description that I’m afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of “that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook”), and he echoed some of the points that Nicholas Carr makes in his Atlantic essay on how the internet may be changing the way we think, and not necessarily for the better.

Tellingly, nearly all the questions that followed had to do with how the attendees could get their internet service to work more cheaply and smoothly - especially in Aspen.

Gah. Sounds discouraging. Here are two possible countermoronic strategies to save us from becoming tubeslaves.

(1) Care less about facts. Factual data — both granular and large-n — is highly privileged in our contemporary world. We want to know all the exceptions to the rules and then we want to know the bigger meta-rule that makes all those exceptions comprehensible, classifiable, and categorizable again. We want to settle arguments with facts and citations. Sure, facts and citations are important. But there are plenty of important conversations to be had in which the arguments you field aren’t justified by brute facts.

Problem: our contemporary world seems to recognize this already — but when we aren’t arguing about factual data, we’re arguing about feelings and senses of things. How many classrooms contain listless yet earnest students, especially in college, who begin all in-class questions or comments with “I feel that…?” How alienated are we already from the world of facts that every other newscast involves anchor asking reporter “Can you gives us a sense of…?” And then there’s the old “I’m fe-e-e-eling a sense of…” that pervades our stereotypical shrink sessions and ironically self-referential social settings. Like a bowl of chunky mayonnaise, our life away from facts is a thick mush of nonjudgmentalism embedded with hard lumps of stridently incomprehensible subjectivities (”It’s a _____ thing — you wouldn’t understand.”).

Hmm. Perhaps strategy 2 is a better place to start.

(2) Care more about values. If we’re too concerned that our subjectivities get ridiculous and confrontational all on their own, perhaps we could turn to a deeper sense of values properly speaking — well-thought-out commitments to aesthetic or moral ways of looking at the world. One problem with this strategy, as critics of modernity love pointing out, is that it risks entering a Weberian world in which facts and values are considered completely separate things. This is bad, the argument runs, because values unmoored from facts become just out-of-control desires to which we enslave our reason. A few people think this is okay in a market economy with the rule of law, I guess because our desires become so domesticated and disenchanted that shopping at Brookstone satisfies our wildest dreams. But we’ve seen where the market pushes us. And indeed some of the best cultural libertarians want to publicly institutionalize what few morally questionable behaviors remain in the black or gray market.

So imagine we can actually reunite facts and values, recognizing that together they make up truths. (Just fire walk with me here for a minute.) Are we safe from the Scylla and Charybdis of our time — unimaginative overreliance on factual information on one side, and too-imaginative pursuit of egotistical desires on the other? So that if we put the crackberry down, we won’t run amok?

Problem: we’ll still be left with one particular union of fact and value that has plagued and defined regimes of free and equal citizens for a long time: public opinion. One good thing about public opinion is that it can free us from slavishly following experts. Often times a big group of people can generate better ideas than a small group of experts (consider Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’s ‘ask the audience’ feature, or Justice Scalia’s dig that a random group culled from the Boston phone book would make sounder legal pronouncements than the Supreme Court). But one bad thing about public opinion is that it obscures where people are getting their information from — which will probably in large part be public opinion itself, thereby compounding the significance of non-public-opinion sources. The problem of people winning arguments by getting the facts off their iPhone is dwarfed by the problem of people winning arguments by getting the ‘facts’ off Facebook — or Wikipedia, that mutant half-breed of expert and public opinion. Public opinion pushes us toward having conversations only about things about which the public has an opinion.

And how are we supposed to know what those are? How are we supposed to know what public opinion, after all, is? How can we laugh at metaphysics as obsolete philosophy, yet believe in and interact with this vast floating disembodied object called public opinion? The unsettling thing about the problem Ross and Mossberg identify is not that the iPhone is making public opinion stupider, but that it’s making us individuals stupider, i.e. less intellectually self-reliant. Surely there’s a sweet spot in there somewhere; the challenge is to figure out how we can convince ourselves of where it is. Maybe one provisional strategy — now that (1) and (2) have been knocked out — is to turn to the Great Grid of Knowledge only when you remember that you remember some detail but can’t remember it.

Example: last week I was in a conversation about Mongolia. (A number of us had just seen Mongol [recommended, mostly for its one-liners]). I asked a trivia question about the one modern-day Mongolian nation-state that was not Mongolia. Shrugs all around. Denials that such a nation-state existed. “Tannu Tuva!” I declared, to blank stares. Well. I had to back this gibberish up with facts. And I knew I was in the right — I had the memories to ‘prove’ it — but I couldn’t muster the level of detail that the group required to believe me. (Also, only moments ago I had told a long, and entirely false, origin myth about the figure of speech ‘balls to the wall.’ I had a certain credibility gap to close.) Out comes the blackberry, up pops Wikipedia, and — yes, there’s Tannu Tuva, complete with flag, name of anthem, and nutshell history.

Rather than getting dumber, both I and the group got smarter. I will always look back on that episode as a paradigm case of using ‘net knowledge responsibly. I’m a big symp when it comes to criticisms of modernity, but I insist upon our ability to behave ourselves even in a thoroughly (late) modern context. I’m also highly sympathetic to criticisms of postmodernity, too, however, meaning I for one do not welcome chipping our medullas and downloading ourselves into the digital bath. Ultimately, avoiding stupidity after Web 2.0 involves a strategy that’s remarkably similar to the one that worked before Web 2.0: not being intellectually lazy. We might try to repress our guilt at being so damn lazy, but the guilt will out.

At Slate, Bill Saletan takes a crack at ape rights in Spain. I must admit, I have zero problem with extending legal protections to animal species on the basis of a rights recognition framework. Score one for the Great Ape Project. But I do have an 800-pound problem with the following:

Peter Singer, the philosopher who co-founded GAP, puts it this way: “There is no sound moral reason why possession of basic rights should be limited to members of a particular species.” If aliens or monkeys are shown to have moral or intellectual abilities similar to ours, we should treat them like people.

I have argued elsewhere at this site that a properly human ethics is impossible unless grounded firmly in the humanness of humans. My support for ape rights is consonant with this: but only insofar as we recognize the rights of apes as a consequence of our humanity, rather than as a consequence of our ’shared animality’ or some such useless, dangerous construct. So Singer’s remark is deeply troublesome. Look closer, and you see a rank tautology. There is no sound reason, Singer argues, why the possession of rights not limited to members of a particular species should be limited to members of a particular species. This is no way to win, much less make, an argument of such magnitude.

Saletan too misses the mark. To what extent should nonhuman animals with “similar” moral and intellectual abilities be treated “like” humans? Much less like people, a term that carries far more moral weight? There is an effort afoot to extend personhood to creatures to which we could never extend humanhood. I suppose it is quaint in the seemingly interminable era of corporate personhood to get upset about this, but the risk is clear: flattering our uniquely human hearts and minds by treating subhuman animals as similarly to ourselves as necessary for us to feel good about it.

For all the puerile pleasure we derive from creating these false solidarities, we can run from the singularity of our humanity but we can’t hide. Probably the least noble aspect of the current effort to make animals into people involves its consolation prize value for those driven to distraction over our inability even to secure intra-species solidarity.

(Pic courtesy Flicker nicodio.)

Peter Beinart, he of the heavy-duty Time topic of Patriotism With America At A (Nother) Crossroads, wants to be an equal-opportunity chastiser. What could be more bipartisan and transcendent? But nothing can justify the transcendence of wisdom behind his cheap shot on ‘right-wing’ patriotism:

[...] in America, where most people hail from somewhere else [...] blood-and-soil patriotism makes no sense. There is something vaguely farcical about conservative panic over Mexican flags in Los Angeles when Irish flags have long festooned Boston’s streets on St. Patrick’s Day. [My bold] Linking patriotism too closely to a reverence for inherited tradition contradicts one of America’s most powerful traditions: that our future shouldn’t be dictated by our past.

By defining Americanism too narrowly and backwardly, conservative patriotism risks becoming clubby. And by celebrating America too unabashedly–without sufficient regard for America’s sins–it risks degenerating from patriotism into nationalism, a self-righteous, chest-thumping ideology that celebrates America at the expense of the rest of the world.

You want farcical? How about failing to confess that “conservative panic” over Mexican flags reflects the not-so-vague difference between a horde of legal Irish immigrants and a horde of illegal Mexican ones? The only clubbiness that’s risked by this sort of distinction is the one where the membership roll is set by (gasp) citizenship. Ah, but that’s the bone in the throat of my brilliant nemesis Martha Nussbaum, among others:

Eminent thinkers, from Tolstoy to contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb, have denounced patriotism on exactly those grounds: that it’s wrong to prefer one’s countrymen and -women to people in other lands. Patriotism, in Kateb’s words, is illiberal; it “is an attack on the Enlightenment.” There’s a lot of truth in that. Liberals may love America in part because it aspires to certain ideals, but if they love it only because it aspires to those ideals, then what they really love is the ideals, not America. Conservatives are right. To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.

Ay carumba. The key to patriotism rightly understood is NOT to water down Heidegger’s demento vision of the volk with a collective hallucination about the lovableness of ‘our ideals.’ Citizens are nothing like family members, and your country — ‘Uncle Sam’ to the contrary — is not at all like a real uncle or a father or a mother. Patriotism does not have to mean ‘loving’ your country. I’m not even sure how one goes about loving one’s country. I know how to greatly respect and appreciate and prize and honor and how to be proud of one’s country, which is a disembodied thing rather than a bodily person. If that’s not good enough for patriotism, I’m not sure what is.

So yes, I am implicitly pooping on the etymology of patria-tism. But wait. What if the patria involved here is less Soil and more Blood — meaning the blood, bodies, and souls of our actual fathers and mothers? Consider that Rieff may be right in saying:

Authority is always of the past and finds the living to recognize the voting rights — the true democracy of the greatest number — of the dead.

Yet wait. Authority is not power, and politics is, finally about power — the power to exclude. (Contrast with Schmitt’s incorrect definition: the power to decide the exception.) Authority, following Rieff, is that which makes us powerless to exclude, that which asserts itself as a non-negotiable presence in our midst. Citizenship, by contrast, is a joint and several assertion of exclusivity. So there is a tension here — one European countries, for instance, have been unable to resolve. The genius of the United States of America (if I may be so patriotic) is not in its very easy-to-clear bar to entry, but in the nature of that bar: you have to do more than just show up. You have to buy in. Simple, if you really want to and put forth the effort. So citizenship in America stands in a singular and complex relation to the authority of the forefathers. The task of politics, when it comes to new citizens, is to reject potential entrants who reject that relation or have no interest in continuing it (i.e. merely migrant laborers). This makes for a certain amount of confusion for typical moderns who want everything to be simple, clear, obvious, transparent, a creed that fits on a post-it note. It results in great confusion for those who think all conservatives upset about Mexicanization are racist or even culture-ist. (Although obviously there are some of these, their passion would deflate, I strongly wager, if illegal immigration was really halted.)

Patriotism is less about love of country than it is stewardship of the goods of citizenship — of a share in exclusive, even if very welcoming, sovereignty. The love metaphor drags us, as usual, into a sea of sloppy seconds, and not just seconds — confusing love of family with love of friends, love of intimates with love of strangers, love of people with love of ideas. A big Rousseauvian group grope around the maypole of re-enchantment. Politics doesn’t need enchantment. That’s what the authority of the forefathers provides — a presiding presence in which we cannot but place faith, and place ourselves within it. The problem with patriotism talk on the right and the left is that, as the authority of the forefathers decays, civic-minded good people seek to replace true patria-tism with patriot-ism — to have politics step into a breach it can never fill. For the Obama-aligned this means that politics can transcend politics through a message of hope and healing delivered from the podium-pulpit. For the McCain-aligned, it means ditto through a message of sacrifice and honor. Hope, healing, sacrifice, and honor are all words it’s okay to utter in politics — but not as a substitute for the passions, interests, remembrances, and practices of life outside citizenship.

(Thru Andrew.)

Rod Dreher will just lurv this one. In a general sign of the horribleness of Time magazine and the culture at large, the hot new story is the mainstreaming of wild, nasty sex (with your husband or wife, of course) in Christian churches. For fans of crazy hot sex on the one hand and Christianity on the other, the following should be an equal turn-off:

Superior sex can be difficult for some couples to discuss with each other, let alone with their pastor. But having taken on almost every other aspect of their congregants’ lives, churches oriented toward young adults and Gen Xers have begun promoting not just better sex, but more of it. Well, not just promoting it but penciling it in. When New Direction launched its “40 Nights of Grrreat Sex” program, the Spencers gave participants daily planners. A typical week is marked “Sun: Worship together”; “Mon: Give your wife a full body massage”; “Tues: Quickie in any room besides the bedroom”; “Wed: Pleasure your partner”; “Thurs: Read 1 Corinthians 7–How can I please you more?”; and so on.

[...] In February, Paul Wirth, pastor of the Relevant Church in Tampa, Fla., issued what he called “The 30-Day Sex Challenge.” The program featured an extensive questionnaire, a Bible verse a day and the assumption that participants would engage in some kind of sex each night. Wirth says he has received calls from eight pastors asking about his program’s guidelines. A megachurch in Texas, the Fellowship of the Woodlands, holds semiannual Sacred Sex Weekends (”Learn how you can experience a fulfilling sex life with God’s blessing”).

Wow. I read things like this and I wonder why must we make things so hard on ourselves? Shouldn’t it be obvious that “a fulfilling sex life with God’s blessing” can be achieved without church supervision, or even without church instruction? Indeed, wouldn’t your sex life be worsened and made totally weird by conforming it to some kind of pastor-approved checklist? How is this happening? What is it that drives people to want every element of their lives to be managed from above according to one trusty set of rules? Why must the Bible contain the answer to which room and which orifice ought to be the designated pleasure center of the day?

This isn’t a psycho religious impulse. It’s a psycho modern impulse. It pops up everywhere — in churches, in workplaces, in self-help aisles of the bookstore, in politics (where ‘principle’ means a top-down ideology that never leaves you in the uncomfortable position of having to agonize over a policy option). We free and equal moderns want single standards that can organize and bless all manner of trivial little details. Without some kind of all-encompassing bubble, the prospect of sorting through the zillions of options, temptations, and hobgoblins of everyday life becomes a horror. ‘Scheduling in sex’ — in Weberian bureaucracy-speak, routinizing it — makes just as much ’sense’ as a Call from God as it does a Rule for Health:

For instance, a husband can expect smoother sailing at night if he helps his wife clear her “to do” list that evening, Spencer said in a conference call with his wife, who added, “Otherwise he’s just another thing on that list.”

After all, why would God want us to be unhealthy? And how can we be healthy in a smithereens of constantly changing details without little habits to oscillate around? But, yikes, as I suggest below, there’s something unhealthy about manic planning, about the management fetish we develop and turn back on ourselves. The real problem, I think, is that modern management as therapeutic way to eliminate agony and anxiety depends on transparency. And transparency about one’s sex life is pretty unappealing in or out of church:

“After more than 20 yrs of marriage, this has been ‘a shot in the arm,’” one New Direction congregant wrote on the Spencers’ blog. “In the past month we have been to Victoria’s Secret 4 times (the secret is out!!). Thanks Pastor and 1st Lady for your openness, and obediences to God.”

Obedience to God (and the lesser deities of Taste, Decorum, and Propriety) involves at least a minimum of closedness. Any concept of human dignity we want to develop must center on the integral identity of our particular selves, and our particular selves lose that identity when everything about us, including our most intimate, exclusive practices, becomes common knowledge and common property. Before I start raving about sexual socialism, let me finish glibly in the parlance of our times by offering to pit the Unity Church of OMG against the congregation I have founded, the First Church of TMI.

(Pic courtesy Flickrer Erika wears Cortez.)

Amateurism is not ignorance. And politics is not life. But consider Matt Yglesias:

I’m a very “bad” tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way — seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of my favorite paintings, well-liked enough that I swiftly made it the wallpaper on my iPhone when I get it. And then yesterday I was ambling around the Art Institute of Chicago and, unexpectedly, there it was! Naturally I then took a photo with the iPhone and set that to be my wallpaper. But wallpaper aside, the point is that not knowing what the collection’s highlights are until you get a chance to look around preserves a certain element of the thrill of discovery even though obviously it’s already a super-famous painting.

I read this and thought, “That’s right.” Not that I think people who plan out every step of their vacations are defective or awful. But it’s neither my style nor Matt’s and I think we can tell a pretty solid story about the goods of doing things our way. Actually, on a second read, we could tell two different stories — one focusing on the ‘positive’ experience of discovering the unexpected, and one on the ‘negative’ experience of leaving oneself unsupervised. To get only a little silly, one could say Matt’s story is the liberal story about the goods of ignorance in life (pro-creativity), while mine is the conservative story (anti-management).

But on my first read of Matt’s story, my dominant reaction was, “There’s no way this set of observations should get translated, as if by some kind of mandatory machine, into politics. How gross and unattractive it would be if going on vacation — like everything else — had to be ‘branded’ by ideology, drawn into competing lifestyle niches. Conservative Tourism – there’s a book I don’t want to read.”

Obviously, a dilemma. In an effort to escape it, this is a great opportunity to distinguish between superficial bipartisanship and a more nuanced quest to find common political philosophical ground. It strikes me that an ethic of political amateurism is a promising representation of that kind of ground. Matt’s story is useful because it shows how the way we do politics should probably always burble up from the way we live our practical lives from day to day. And I want to underscore the difference between amateurism and dilettantism, between lives and politics created together in an improvisational way and those dabbled in as Marx would have it — fishing in the morning, tending the pot garden in the afternoon, writing for The New Yorker in the evening. In addition to an ethic of creativity, amateurism carries an ethic of restraint — a suspicion that too much passion in the creativity department will lead either to the systematization of new-experience thrill-seeking or to chaos. Too much suspicion, however, traps an amateur in a procedural rut of his or her own: the inclination is to deny that anything, really, is a singular event, a non-negotiable experience that commands a certain reaction (like being thrilled — or awed). This kind of asceticism defeats amateurism as well.

File under adventures in postmodern conservatism.