Eunomia

While I enjoy trying to discover what a filmmaker meant to say in his work -- and searching for what other inspiring messages can be found in a film even if they were never intended by its creators -- I'm beginning to think that Firefly/Serenity is a lot like Star Wars in at least one respect: what an audience member finds reflects more on him than on the work.

(I am still amazed at the insinuation that The Phantom Menace was a racist movie: supposedly, the Neimoidians' accents slurred Asians, Watto's accent slurred Mediterraneans, and Jar Jar Binks slurred blacks. The obvious Asian influence in the Queen's wardrobe, the Italian architecture of Naboo, and the fact that Yoda's only equal was a black man meant nothing.)

(To say nothing of the fact that the evil mastermind behind everything was played by a British white male, that one of his pupils -- Count Dooku -- was likewise a Brit, and that all the Imperial officers had British accents.)

Serenity's fanbase crosses idealogical lines, and people all over the political spectrum believe that the film speaks to their cause. On the left, we have City Paper...

"A future in which a well-meaning conglomerate government has been seized by fundamentalist zealots who want to sedate their own populace into comatose complacency? Gee, what could that be about?"

...and on the right, we have The American Spectator.

"In addition to being a solidly entertaining science fiction romp, Serenity is the rare film that advocates small government and libertarian ideals."

Joss Whedon has said that the movie is political but not partisan, and this may be why it resonates with so many people in a political sense, but in different ways.

So, I'm not surprised by the fact you see the crew of Serenity as reactionary.

I'm also not pursuaded, for at least three reasons.

1) It's simply not the case that Serenity had "a crew of 'Independents' who fought against their own version of the forces of consolidation in their struggle against what is termed simply 'Unification.'"

Mal and Zoe fought as Browncoats. Not even counting the three passengers who joined at the beginning of the TV series, the others did not. Kaylee did not; as a mercenary, Jayne emphatically did not; Inara supported Unification; and Wash may have had a minor role in the war, but his sense of humor left that possibility up in the air.

("Geese!")

So, out of an initial crew of six and a maximum crew of nine, there were at most three Browncoats.

2) Let's look back to a Christopher Lasch passage that Rod Dreher quoted in his blog.

"Not only do conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism, they have a distorted understanding of the 'traditional values' they claim to defend. The virtues they want to revive are the pioneer virtues: rugged individualism, boosterism, rapacity, a sentimental deference to women, and a willingness to resort to force. These values are 'traditional' only in the sense that they are celebrated in the traditional myth of the Wild West and embodied in the Western hero, the prototypical American lurking in the background, often in the very foreground, of conservative ideology. In their implications and inner meaning, these individualist values are themselves profoundly anti-traditional."

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but if radical reactionaries reject the myth of the Wild West, then holding up Malcolm Reynolds as one of their own is only slightly less believable than endorsing Clint Eastwood's character in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

3) Without commenting on the substance of the words you used, I'd like to return for a moment to this post, and focus on the sound of it.

In writing about "the conservative vision of order," in denouncing choice as something unnatural to be restrained and mortified, and in denouncing our "preoccupation with choice and self-satisfaction," you sound like neither Mal Reynolds nor Zoe. You sound like neither Wash nor Jayne. You do not even sound like Shepherd Book.

You sound like the Operative.

I'm not at all suggesting that you share his ends or agree with his means, but it does seem to me that calling your claim a stretch is a gross understatement.

Yes, Firefly and Serenity can be embraced by people from across the spectrum, though usually everyone who finds something to like in them identifies with opposing consolidation and concentration of wealth and power. That is one element in what seems to bind the RRs together. I know that Firefly is hardly an ideal "fit," but it also seemed to have enough dissidents against utopian Empire to qualify. It's fair to say that RRs wouldn't have much use for the Wild West as it is imagined in legend; the actual settlement of the West, where people set up a homestead and lived there the rest of their lives, is a different story all together. The heart of the post, as must be clear to all, focused on the Browncoat loyalties of the Independents as an example of RRism. I thought I made it pretty clear that I acknowledged the problems with including them from the start. You have managed to ably repeat what I already said.

Presumably Mal and Zoe never read much St. Maximos the Confessor or Richard Weaver. "Vision of order" is, of course, the title of a Weaver book and an expression of the man's learned, humane conservatism. Not that I would expect you know anything about what Weaver had to say. You have demonstrated an antipathy to his particular "vision" since day one, so it makes sense that calls for moral restraint sound the same to you as a lunatic assassin's ravings about eliminating sin from the universe.

The Shepherd seems like something of a cross between a monk and an itinerant preacher, so he might understand more of what I was talking about in that post than it might seem at first glance. But I'm willing to grant that those folks would not take to what I said in that post. There are lots of people in Look Homeward, America who wouldn't share a lot of my views. Do the members of the "militia of love" know their St. Maximos? I doubt it. Yet in their common sense localism they express more concrete commitment to the permanent things than a boatload of theologians, and that is surely part of the point of the book. Whether or not the characters of Firefly agree with Orthodox theology and Russell Kirk doesn't really matter for the purpose of determining whether they are Reactionary Radical material. The alternative to being a Reactionary Radical is always a Front-Porch Anarchist, and by that standard the crew of Serenity seems to fit a bit better. But happily the discussion over at RR is thankfully much more interesting than going through some sort of check-list of acceptable views.

The book isn't a Who's Who of people who easily fall in with anyone's party line, which is usually why they are better witnesses to defending home and hearth than a lot of others who are more easily pigeon-holed. Odd, isn't it, that more than a few of the contributors to Reactionary Radicals, the blog, are the same traditional conservatives from Crunchy Cons? Perhaps the fact that all these traditional conservatives from ISI keep revisiting the same themes that CCism brings up (not to mention their publication of the ACE with reams of entries affirming the traditional conservative "vision of order") has some bearing on the relationship of CCism to the broader conservative tradition. That's a notion worth considering for a moment.

Briefly, Daniel:

Presumably Mal and Zoe never read much St. Maximos the Confessor or Richard Weaver. "Vision of order" is, of course, the title of a Weaver book and an expression of the man's learned, humane conservatism. Not that I would expect you know anything about what Weaver had to say. You have demonstrated an antipathy to his particular "vision" since day one, so it makes sense that calls for moral restraint sound the same to you as a lunatic assassin's ravings about eliminating sin from the universe.

I will reiterate that I'm not at all suggesting that you share the Operative's ends or agree with his means; I'm merely saying that what you've said about choice fits better in his mouth than in Mal's. That's it; that's all.

But if I may say so, you tend to disparage those of us who apparently don't understand your position:

"Not that I would expect you know anything about what Weaver had to say."

And:

"I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that the distinction between a gnomikon thelema and physikon thelema would be familiar to many."

I've admitted a certain amount of doubt about understanding what it is you espouse. The truth is, it's entirely possible that I'm more open to your ideas than either of us suppose. But you'd probably be more effective persuading others by explaining those ideas rather than turning your nose up at those of us who do not entirely grasp them.

That assumes your goal is advancing your beliefs, swelling its ranks, rather than merely making yourself feel good about holding what you believe to be the superior position.

I probably overreacted in my last response. But if I have made the mistake of disparaging those who don't understand what I have said (and I would like to say that my remark about the distinction between gnomic and natural will was meant as a concession and an admission that I had assumed too much in my earlier statements), it could have something to do with the fact that you and your ConCrunchy colleagues seem eager to take everything that Rod, Caleb and I say in the worst possible sense. Thus someone who doesn't recognise the "vision of order" reference and likens this rhetoric to that of totalitarian assassins would, I think, try the patience of anyone trying to discuss conservative ideas. If you are not doing that, you and your colleagues seem all too willing to disparage your adversaries--not for a lack of understanding of what you have said, but simply to goad and berate them.

I think I have made a decent, though obviously not always sufficient, effort to explain and expand upon things in the comments section with all my commenters. It is hardly a surprise that I don't respond well to having traditional conservative rhetoric likened to totalitarianism, however indirectly, especially when this has become one of the standard tropes of the ConCrunchy crowd. It doesn't take long for the cries of "statist" and "totalitarian" to fall from your lips whenever we say something about autonomous choice that Christians have been saying in one form or another for 2,000 years. The crack about your not knowing anything about Weaver may have been excessive, but why would I assume that you did know anything about his work? It has seemed reasonable to me that, if you find my position or that of the others less than clear, and we point to a Weaver or a Kirk as our source, it wouldn't hurt you to check those sources and find that what we have been saying has more to do with the older conservative tradition than a lot of the stuff imported by the Austrian economists. That is, in less polemical form, what CCism was saying.

Point taken; I will try in the future to be more careful both to avoid assuming the worst about people like you and Rod and to ascertain what was written by guys like Weaver and Kirk.

Though I will say that it seems to me that, if mainstream conservatives do not recognize often enough the need for permanence that Kirk highlighted, the crunchy cons and traditionalists do the same thing when it comes to change. Kirk wrote that "permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society," (emphasis mine) and it's an error to lean too far in one direction or the other.

And while I do intend to read Rod's book as soon as my reserved copy comes back to my local library, I also plan to read a book I've skimmed once before -- Hayek's Road to Serfdom -- as it seems to be the sort of mainstream conservative thought (those "Austrian economists") people like you seem to loathe. If my concerns about Rod's book is correct, that he misrepresents mainstream conservativsm as greedy and godless materialism, then perhaps I'm not the only one who needs to a more diverse reading list.

I'm pleased that we're starting to reach some understanding. The capacity for any tradition to adapt and incorporate change is a measure of its ability to reproduce and perpetuate itself. If traditional and crunchy conservatives at present tend to emphasise this less, I expect it is because we do not see any danger that people will be too hostile to change and innovation. If all people in the West generally participate to one degree or other in what George Grant called "the religion of progress," in which technology plays such a prominent role, the need to emphasise the importance of cultivating the things of permanence and continuity is that much greater. If we have been stressing the side of continuity and permanence over that of making creative use of change, it has been because conservatives in Kirk's mould define themselves in terms of their loyalty to and preservation of the permanent things (which are, as the Kirk Center's website puts it fairly well, if vaguely, "all that makes human life worth living, particularly the bedrock principles that have traditionally supported and maintained the health of society’s central institutions: family, church, and school"). To the extent that CCism was intended as an idea principally for a conservative audience, this aspect of creative synthesis took precedence because it had appeared to have fallen into desuetude among a lot of people in the "movement."

On Hayek and the Austrians generally, I am not categorically writing them off nor do I generally "loathe" them. In my experience, the Austrians provide the respectable arguments for economic liberty that are then exploited by others for arguments that undermine any sense of serving the common good in terms other than maximising growth. It would be one thing to recognise the power of capitalism to dissolve traditional loyalties and see this as a tension to be balanced successfully, and quite another to embrace (Larry Kudlow-like) Schumpeter's phrase of "creative destruction" without Schumpeter's own concern for the genuinely destructive side of it.

On Kudlow specifically, here are a few articles where he uses Schumpeter's phrase with no clear sense of what Schumpeter meant by it and no sense that there is anything amiss with the destructive side of it:

http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200511171217.asp

http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200411160821.asp

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/kudlow042202.asp

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/kudlow110599.asp

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/larrykudlow/2004/02/26/10885.html

You can hear more of the same stuff on his CNBC show. As I hope these articles will show, Kudlow uses the phrase as a purely positive slogan, and as far as I can tell sees no "downside" to the process of "creative destruction." On his blog, he declares in the heading that he is "pro-growth." There was a time when someone saying that he was "pro-growth" would not trouble me at all; once upon a time, I was a regular believer in WSJ conventional wisdom. Now I have begun to understand that someone who supports growth as Kudlow does makes growth his overriding priority, and that this comes at the expense of domestic and local life. Yet it is these latter things that lend character, richness, culture and beauty to life; they are part of the permanent things, and the "pro-growth" folks are by and large less than deeply concerned about what happens to them.

Kudlow's enthusiasm for technology unleashing "gales of creative destruction" would have made George Grant shudder, to put it mildly. In my view, anything that would make George Grant shudder should give us serious pause and should probably cause us to run screaming in the other direction. Kudlow is the kind of conservative Rod and the rest of us have been railing against. Grant is the kind of conservative we would generally want to emulate.

Against Big Government "conservatives," we, the Austrians and their libertarian fellows are natural allies up to a point. I contrasted the Austrians with the older conservative tradition to point out the historical reality that classical liberal economics of their school came into our conservative tradition much more recently. As for Hayek's critique of state intervention in the economy creating a new servility, I am in substantial agreement.

What I would want to stress at the same time is that a similar servility and dependency can be created by corporations and especially by the entire structure of a substantially service-oriented economy. (This dependency may be inevitable in any industrial economy, but in a service economy it seems to me to be even worse.) I would also want to stree that the requirements of efficiency will dissolve or weaken those local and domestic institutions that serve as sources of protection against public and private abuses.

All apologies for not replying sooner; work's being ramped up, and I wanted to take the time to read through the Kudlow articles you posted.

By themselves, I do not believe those articles indicate that Kudlow believes that the "creative destruction" of innovation has no downside. He didn't mention a downside, true enough, but doing so would have often been a digression from the point he was trying to make in each column -- from asserting that Reagan's economic policies accomplished the economic goals that were predicted to asserting that Kerry's policy proposals does not make economic sense. If Kudlow truly believes that economic growth is the overriding priority of human civilization, then an absense of the recognition of the downsides of innovation would make sense, but we should not make the mistake of affirming the consequent.

That said, I am increasingly of the opinion that you're right, at least about Larry Kudlow. Admittedly, I don't read his work that much, but I thought his recent article about immigration was atrocious in relying on demagogery and in failing to address any substantive concerns with Bush's position. And I came across one article, from 2002, supporting invading Iraq; his emphasis on the positive effects on the stock market was downright creepy. Like the articles you cited, both these articles make the most sense if Kudlow truly thinks in economic terms first and foremost. It may be that the gist of his writing does confirm your suspicions.

But I doubt many conservatives follow Kudlow primarily; some are social conservatives primarily, some surely temper their reading of Kudlow with writers like Dennis Prager and Al Mohler (or, hell, even Jonah Goldberg), and some support the free market more for moral/libertarian reasons along the lines of Thomas Sowell than for the reasons that drive overly ambitious daytraders. As such, it may have been grossly unfair if Rod has in fact lumped all or most mainstream/non-crunchy conservatives in with those who truly could be described as greedy materialists.

Now it is my turn to apologise for a delayed response. Things here at the end of the year have been similarly hectic, and I didn't want to dash off a quick response.

You're right that Kudlow's articles by themselves don't prove that he sees no negative consequences to "creative destruction," but it is my impression from his columns and his television show that he cites Schumpeter without any awareness (or at least, without any acceptance) of Schumpeter's conviction that this "creative destruction" was often ruinous for traditional communities and that this was, in Schumpeter's view, a terrible cost imposed by capitalism. Like Michael "whirlwind of energy" Ledeen, for Kudlow it seems that "creative destruction" is a good force for liberating human potential, which probably makes their idea sound better than I think it is. It is not so much liberation as the directed use of explosives--the ground will be cleared, and much will be destroyed in the process.

As much as the CCs and RRs are assuredly very committed to tradition, these two seem to be nearly absolutely committed to progress and revolutionary forces in political and economic life (in fairness, Ledeen often describes himself as a liberal democrat or a revolutionary, but conventionally moves within conservative circles and speaks as if his revolutionarism is in agreement with conservative ideals). I'm glad we can agree that the Kudlovian extreme is undesirable, and I second your view of Kudlow's immigration piece. This was also the chap, if you recall, who denounced opponents of the Dubai ports deal as Islamophobes without any consideration of legitimate security fears that the deal raised.

http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200602241359.asp

Say what you will about the deal, but his response here anticipated his knee-jerk response on immigration pretty well and cast the argument in similar terms.

I grant that relatively few pundits can be found who fit the "mainstream conservative" type in Rod's book as well as Kudlow. But there are Kudlovians and those approximating them. It would have been better if Crunchy Cons could have included more distinctions in the description of "mainstream conservatism" between urban secular conservatives, suburban evangelicals, small town folks and so on to have a sort of sliding scale to show where a materialist ethic had penetrated most deeply, because I think what Rod was getting at in the book envelops two different kinds of "mainstream conservatives": those who vote strictly based on economic interest and economic policy and ignore all other issues (this would be what I have called the tax-cuts-only crowd), and those whose votes may be driven by social and religious concerns but still wind up falling into a lot of the regular consumerist ditches that are laid for all of us. I would like to emphasise that the purpose of making this critique is to warn fellow conservatives about these pitfalls and to offer them counsel (insufficient or odd as some of it might seem to some) on how to get out of the ditch.

I agree that many people are not primarily following Kudlow. People often have duelling convictions warring inside of them and may be taking something from a number of sources. Kudlow represents what traditional conservatives since Kirk have regarded very dimly as corporate conservatism--it was precisely against this kind of conservatism-for-monied-interests that Kirk was rebelling when he started writing about conservatism.

Kudlow's prominence and his place at NR lend his ideas respectability and authority in the "movement" and the fact that he can operate so easily in the upper echelons of the "movement" is because a great many of these pundits basically accept "Kudlovian" ideas in diluted forms. That being said, I think we can recognise that people will run the gamut between Kudlow and, say, Sowell and between Sowell and Kirk, etc. Not all "mainstream conservatives" are simply "greedy materialists" without any qualification, but I hope we can agree that a lot of conservatives are too given over to materialism in their lives and that this is a serious disconnect from the conservative tradition's ideals. Basically Kudlow's significance lies in what it says about the spirit of the conservative "movement" that he is considered part of the conservative spectum at all.

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