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Notes on Nostalgia

Approximately one month ago, Fr. Jonathan Tobias, who maintains a blog entitled Second Terrace, authored three meditations on the subject of locality, memory, nostalgia, modernity, and the Church. Those posts may be read here, here, and here, and together constitute a gentle interrogation of certain intellectual and spiritual tendencies on what might be referred to as the 'alternative right'. Critical to this interrogation is the distinction between nostalgia and memory, between sentimentality and a rooted, lived tradition - preferably Tradition. In the comments following the third post, I wrote what follows, not in order to engage in a fruitless disputation, but in an attempt to clarify, to excavate, the genesis of nostalgia as a cultural and psychological phenomenon; for nostalgia, that sentimental gaze fixed upon an idealized past, at once warm and wistful, is not a primary phenomenon, but a secondary, symptomatic one - symptomatic of the unhomelikeness experienced in times of relentless, remorseless change.

Brief Notes on Nostalgia


While agreeing with virtually all of the analyses given in the post, I cannot be so quick to dismiss the phenomenon of nostalgia, inasmuch as it is a symptom, and fairly begs to be diagnosed as such. Christopher Lasch, in his The True and Only Heaven - a near-magisterial treatment of these themes, in my estimation - is at pains to distinguish nostalgia and memory, as well as optimism and hope. Obviously, the former terms in these binaries are disordered, but what is important is that the phenomenon of nostalgia is the mirror image of progress, the relentless, churning, ceaselessly-revolutionizing, creatively-destroying Gadarene plunge into a fervently-desired future of BiggerBetterFasterMore, which, so far from increasing human satisfaction, seems to increase discontent with every achievement. Progress is typically portrayed, especially among certain 'conservative' temporizers, who wish to combine the incongruous elements of modernity in economics and material culture with traditionalism in morality, as a merely neutral relieving of man's estate that leaves us 'stuck with virtue' - although they also want to have it the other way, with the wellsprings of modernity, on their constructions, arising from the deepest aquifers of Christianity - but it is obvious that progress is merely a transposition, to the societal level, of the dialectic of the passions. It is driven, not by an impulse or judgment that human desires and aspirations should be conformed to natural limits, either those of our common nature or those of the nature that remains a common inheritance, however much we feign otherwise, but by the impulse to fulfill an ever-increasing wish-list of desires, typically, as is modernity's wont, by means of greater quantities of desire's objects. Progress is the attempt to satiate the infinite appetite of desire, to fill its fathomless abyss, with sheer quantity; as such, it is both born of a certain spiritual restlessness and productive of that restlessness, as each evanescent satisfaction generates a greater longing.



However, because this process itself has been made possible only by the ceaseless revolutionizing of all social forms and arrangements, the reduction of every tradition to a transient style or mode, as all social fixities are made to yield to the reign of quantity and the false infinity of desire, it generates a sense of unhomelikeness. We become restless, not merely because each temporal satisfaction fails to quench desire's flames, but because we sense, however inchoately, that we have become alienated from ourselves, and from a manner of living that better conforms to aspects of human nature other than sheer desire. This gnawing sense of unhomelikeness is the root of nostalgia, the ineliminable doppelganger of progress. It is not too much to suggest that, as our very discontent with the ephemerality of temporal satisfactions is the trace of paradise, that restlessness that only rests in God, so also is this sense of unhomelikeness a trace of a better sort of societal existence, one that more nearly conforms to the lineaments of human nature.

Nostalgia, then, is merely the derailment of this healthy sense of alienation or unhomelikeness, its devolution into false idealizations of past periods of history - or even the creation of entirely abstract, mythical pasts, as in certain forms of literature and political philosophy - shorn of their contingency, complexity, and all-too real ethical failings. But nostalgia, however much it may thus falsify, nonetheless latches on to real failings in the present. There are reasons why, from the seventies until the present, much American nostalgia has gravitated towards the 1950s, and why still older strains of nostalgia have conjured images of small-town life, or of pastoral tranquility. The practical problem of nostalgia, then, as signaled by the idealization, is that it hermetically seals the past from the present, sighing wistfully at something irrevocably lost; for, absent memory, the past cannot function as an example, stimulus, or even a tradition guiding personal and communal reform in the present.

Instead of dismissing nostalgia, then, we should work our ways back from its false idealizations and comforts, to the unhomelikeness that spawned it; from thence we can engage in the anamnetic labours by which memory is unearthed, and revivified in the present.


Comments (46)

Interesting.

I'm not sure what to make of the word "unhomelikeness." How does it differ from homelessness or homesickness?

Also, given this fascinating critique of nostalgia, as it is distinguished from memory; how shall we then distinguish both from history?

Relatedly, this seems like an extraordinary claim: "absent memory, the past cannot function as an example . . ." There are more claims for the past's inadequacies, but this one alone is at least dubious to me. Strictly speaking, we do not have access to memory for all that long. And even the most textured, balanced, stable, free community, the very Shire itself, cannot have memory past a few generations. So history as a record of experience -- not true memory, but some real approximation of it -- can surely "function as an example," it seems to me.

If I search American history for instances where our forebears have, say, faced an internal subversive threat, or suffered under a ruinous excess of Capitalism, or endured factionalism and fierce party folly -- do I risk nostalgia when I do this?

but it is obvious that progress is merely a transposition, to the societal level, of the dialectic of the passions.

OK, but that's not how Popes Paul VI and Benedict XVI viewed progress - see Populorum Progressio and Caritas in Veritate. Mayhap there is indeed a notion of progress that does conform closely to what Maximos identifies. But if so, it is a degenerate, or at least only incomplete notion of progress. Perhaps Maximos ought to say exactly the sort of progress that he means to come under his condemnation, since it is not the universal meaning of progress considered in its own right, and then he might use a distinctive term for it - maybe "secularist progress".

We become restless, not merely because each temporal satisfaction fails to quench desire's flames, but because we sense, however inchoately, that we have become alienated from ourselves, and from a manner of living that better conforms to aspects of human nature other than sheer desire.

Let's take a simple example: medical "progress" that identifies germs in the mouth that cause gum disease and other ailments more serious (though gum disease can be serious in its own right, unchecked, because it can impact diet severely, and result in malnutrition.) Medical "progress" comes up with the waterpik to combat the problem. Now, it is clear that a world without plastic and without mass production and without cheap home appliances would never have invented that machine. Maximos, can you seriously say that the inventor of the waterpik could even remotely have the breadth of knowledge and vast, nay, God-like estimation of future results to have been able to say with confidence: "well, I could invent this machine, but it would end up contributing too much complexity and too much materialism to society for it to be worth the goods that it will produce, so I am going to refrain from inventing it." I don't think so.

But most everywhere you look in the changes in the material order, from antiquity to medieval, from medieval to modern times, each inventor's contribution has been of exactly the same character: a small nudge with a clearly defined good and a totally inchoate downside: from the javelin to the arrow, from the simple arrow to the barbed arrow, from the short bow to the longbow, from copper and tin to bronze, from cast iron to steel, from the simple cart to the cart whose front wheels pivot.

Unless your gold standard is a society which rejects all material change until it has been tested and proven, philosophically and sociologically, to not result in excess complexity, materialism and alienation, (see: Amish), I don't see any theoretical possibility for a society to prevent the situation where material goods change all the time.

Now, I will grant that some forms of change are wholly driven by an insane commitment to worldly vanity and other spiritual ills, such as the idiotic changes in women's "fashion." And if people were rightly ordered, these forms of change would come to a screeching halt, because there would be nobody to seek what fleeting "goods" are thus achieved. But typically, we don't normally use the word "progress" to categorize that sort of change, do we? But isn't it also likely that the foolishness of the constant change is at least as much the result of the degenerated spirit that infects our culture, than that it is the cause of that degeneracy?

Brief but interesting discussion of this issue....

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=7649

The question being, how much of modernity should conservatives embrace?

How interesting that Patrick Deneen (another really annoying post of whose was brought to my attention just the other day) actually _lauds_ a characterization of his views according to which we must reject "en toto" not only democracy and capitalism, but also science.

Wow. I hope he enjoys his life without science or any of the benefits thereof, but I hope he enjoys it alone.

As for those Easterners he mentions who haven't been able to retain their "traditional" cultures in the face of modernity, well, yes. That all started when the Brits abolished suttee in India. Perhaps Mr. Deneen would like them to be able to return to it. Other things that may, hopefully, be casualties of modernity: honor killings and FGM. But don't worry, those Indians he mentioned, they're fighting back for their traditional culture with anti-conversion laws. They don't waste time on nostalgia, that's for sure. They get right with the program and _fight_ modernity. The Muslims, too.

No, thanks.

I think Deneen's point is that if you accept modernity as a whole, then try to separate out the good aspects from the bad, it becomes a nasty, unproductive business, akin to picking peanuts out of poop (thank you, Guy Ritchie).

On the other hand, if you "reject" the modern project and remain suspicious of it as a whole, you are in a better position to recognize the true goods that have come out of it, without conflating them with that problematic whole.

I wouldn't want to speak for Deneen, but the way I view it is this: conservatives should be very wary of making peace with modernity qua modernity. It's one thing to sing the praises of modern dentistry and antibiotics. It's quite another to hymn the Enlightenment per se.

The question being, how much of modernity should conservatives embrace?

Rob, I would suggest that the first step is to re-phrase the question. Ever since Pope Pius X laid bare the programme of, and condemned, Modernism, it seems reasonable that we don't really need to think of embracing modernity as such.

Nevertheless, the point is a good one. There is nothing intrinsically incoherent with embracing antibiotics that were invented during the modern era while rejecting the errors that are typical of the culture during the modern era. After all, if one must live in an era and suffer its blindnesses and evils, one ought to be able to also enjoy its distinctive goods as well. What is probably mentally incoherent is embracing something like antibiotics while rejecting whatever is part of the modernist programme without which antibiotics could not be. But since it seems to me that antibiotics could be developed in many other cultural environments than Modernism, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to establish that antibiotics can only exist precisely on account of the evils of Modernism. And the same goes for many other aspects of the material order that we have at present.

I'm not sure what to make of the word "unhomelikeness."

Homesickness is typically - outside of certain usages in mystical literature - a longing for an actual place to which one is bound by affection, heritage, family, and so forth; unhomelikeness is the feeling that time itself is out of joint, that the places of one's life, and not those places simply, but the entire mode of being in which those place subsist, is adverse to the natural human requirement of a place in this world: unhomelikeness is the dis-ease of a world in which virtually everything is provisional, transient, alienating.

Also, given this fascinating critique of nostalgia, as it is distinguished from memory; how shall we then distinguish both from history?

Memory is the recollection and preservation of the past in the present, by whatever means this may be effected. Nostalgia is the invocation, tacit or implicit, of a simulacral Golden Age from which the vices of both past and present have been eliminated. It is libertarians pining away for the capitalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, either ignoring or whitewashing the fetid slough of corruption, the brutalization of labour, the starvation wages. It is liberals pining away for the New Deal, cherry-picking the successes and explaining away the failures. It is a certain species of conservative yearning for the 1950s, and the cultural cohesion of that epoch, oblivious to the fact that the emerging culture of crapulent consumerism paved the way for the excesses of the sixties. And so forth.

Perhaps Maximos ought to say exactly the sort of progress that he means to come under his condemnation, since it is not the universal meaning of progress considered in its own right, and then he might use a distinctive term for it - maybe "secularist progress".

But I have identified the sort of progress I cover with my condemnations, namely, a progress centered upon the manufacture of ever more wants, and ever more transient material things with which to slake them, temporarily, of course. It is the progress, not of better meeting some need, say, one related to health, but of making a different/cheaper/newer/more prestigious/etc. widget, merely for the sake of making a new widget, causing people to want it, and making loads of money because one has supplied a new widget, engendered new and useless desires, and induced people to part with money, real or imaginary, in order to satisfy them. It is the chimera of growth economics, the pursuit of the finite infinity, the dog-chasing-its-tail of "never enough". Fashion changes would be the most obvious example of this sort of "progress", though they constitute a slow and fat target. I'm fairly certain that most everyone here knows what is intended by these loose evocations; disordered "progress" is progress that is essentially ateleological, disconnected from any of the ends/virtues of nature, human or otherwise, and pursued with reference to desire and appetite, which, being limitless, traduce the ends of nature.

But typically, we don't normally use the word "progress" to categorize that sort of change, do we?

Perhaps we do not, but the dominant American culture most assuredly does, because this sort of useless flummery generates more superficial prosperity, and this progress is nothing if not reductively quantitative.

But isn't it also likely that the foolishness of the constant change is at least as much the result of the degenerated spirit that infects our culture, than that it is the cause of that degeneracy?

Any social disorder may be traced back to the disorders of the soul, but once a form of disorder has been loosed into society, the process becomes reciprocal, with a given mode of societal 'order' impressing itself upon the souls of its members, become the form of the soul.

It is not good enough for conservatives to reject the modern, since -- by definition -- the modern is where we are and when we are.

What is important for conservatives is to identify and conserve that which should be conserved.

I have found the likes of T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton (and Hilaire Belloc) to be helpful trailblazers for this path.

Of course, "modernism" as a belief-system or culture is reprobate. I take it as a deliberate rejection of Christendom, and an establishment of self-will in opposition to place, limits and the deposit of apostolic truth.

There is much to be gained from Front Porch people like Deneen. But place and limits can exist in the darkness, unenlightened by the Gospel and the Apostolic Church: they can also be lost in the milieu of tribal paganism and the hyper-modern penchant for fragmented virtual reality.

"it seems difficult, if not impossible, to establish that antibiotics can only exist precisely on account of the evils of Modernism. And the same goes for many other aspects of the material order that we have at present."

The thinking I object to is the sort found among some conservatives that says, in effect, that we have to take the negative excesses of modernity with the positive advances, since those excesses are a sort of "cost" of the advances. You want the ability to communicate instantly and access info instantly worldwide? Then don't get too upset about internet porn. You want the ability to travel quickly from city to city in your personal vehicle via the interstates? Then don't let the death of the small town bother you. And so on.

Now it is true that in some cases we only realize these trade-offs in hindsight. But in others there were fair numbers of alarms raised, which unfortunately were ignored, usually for the sake of "progress," which generally reduces to money.

"Memory is the recollection and preservation of the past in the present."

That still leaves it a bit vague, but it definitely allows for the possibility that the art and discipline of history can serve memory effectively. Right?

I guess I'm still a little skeptical of the full weight of condemnation you're heaping on poor pitiful nostalgia. Most people feel pangs of nostalgia now and then; often, indeed, it is feeling centered on actual memories of an actual home: the rush of emotion when I first see the peaks of the Rockies, for instance.

Libertarians may pine for the Gilded Age; they may well make of it an object of nostalgic veneration far in excess of its worth; and especially do so in order to produce an idyllic comparison with which to contrast the New Deal. I have not seen much of that myself. Alas, most libertarian polemic we see today lacks even the historical imagination to be nostalgic about the laissez faire character of that age's economy.

But whatever libertarians may say, it is a fact that you and I, Maximos, have pined for the "capitalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century" -- at least when it comes to its type of investment banking. Say what you will about the railroads and other industrialists, whose adduced abuses I do not dispute; the securities industry at least was far more sane and risk-averse than it is today. The merchant-bankers floated securities on the prestige of their name, and how much trust that name inspired among investors. Disclosure regulations were minimal. If you purchased a bond, it was because you believed in the banker underwriting it. Market discipline of a brutal nature lucked around every corner. Even the biggest American bankers were deeply sensitive to London-based skepticism of American exuberance in expansion.

"Unhomelikeness is the feeling that [the age] is adverse to the natural human requirement of a place in this world: unhomelikeness is the dis-ease of a world in which virtually everything is provisional, transient, alienating."

I'd agree, then, that unhomelikeness is a serious problem in our age. I just wonder what implications of this are. It would seem that the prescription for this ailment would be something akin to, "every man find a home and a church, a real place and real community; next, commit to it, cherish it, defend it and draw your resources from work in its service."

I don't think the prescription would include some political preachment along the lines of, "adopt a position of rigorous opposition to the political economy of your country, and be prepared to denounce folks who will not follow you in this opposition." I would say the political preachment would be simpler. Something like what Jeremiah delivered to the exiles: "seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

In light of that instruction, my judgment is that prudence does not counsel for a position of truculent antagonism toward the private enterprise that is the only real source of wealth and welfare of our cities. This antagonism, it seems to me, is at some odds with the deeper object here of restoring men in their homes. They will have no homes if their cities are deprived of productive business by the machinations of an intrusive state.

That our banking and financier sectors need reform is obvious; that our vision of global capital-market integration is discredited is plain enough, if not quite as obvious; that our whole framework of expansion, growth and progress is shaken is also, I believe, quite plain, or soon will be.

But it does not follow, in my judgment, that we should respond to this with the stridency and expansive rejection that many on the "alternative right" propose.

I actually _agree_ with Rob G above and with Tony regarding separating the good from the bad. I especially agree with Rob G in condemning this:

You want the ability to communicate instantly and access info instantly worldwide? Then don't get too upset about internet porn.

Absolutely. I want Internet porn shut down and vigorously prosecuted. On the interstate and the small town, I'm a little more indifferent, but that's just me.

What struck me about the Deneen piece (really, the piece he in turn approvingly linked from someone else about his position) is that he is definitely saying that we cannot make that separation that Rob G is recommending. That's a bizarre and extreme position. Here is the part I had in mind:

The PoMo Con argument, or hope, is that we can separate modern institutions (Democracy, Capitalism, Science) from modern values (individualism, moral relativism, atheism). If this separation can occur, then these values can be replaced with a more robust understanding of who we are and our place in the cosmos....

Front Porcher Patrick Deneen’s counter to this argument is that modern values are wedded to modern institutions so one must either accept or reject the project in toto. [emphasis added]

This is the first time I can ever remember agreeing with anything that someone else calls PoMo, since I reflexively chamber a round at postmodernism. Indeed, it's usually people saying nice things about postmodernism (because they claim to embrace premodernism) who agree with Deneen. But _of course_ it is possible to accept the good things about democracy, capitalism, and science without embracing individualism (in the negative sense), moral relativism, and atheism.

TONY: But typically, we don't normally use the word "progress" to categorize that sort of change, do we?

Maximos:

Perhaps we do not, but the dominant American culture most assuredly does, because this sort of useless flummery generates more superficial prosperity, and this progress is nothing if not reductively quantitative.

Perhaps that's true, but it is not how I have seen it used generally. For example, I have seen car manufacturer's pronouncements about their new vehicles, in which they refer to the changes to all-wheel anti-lock brakes, and side-curtain air bags, and revolutionary changes in engine efficiency and power all under the term "progress", whereas they don't refer to the change in shape of the rear end, or development of a new set of colors, as "progress".

disordered "progress" is progress that is essentially ateleological, disconnected from any of the ends/virtues of nature, human or otherwise, and pursued with reference to desire and appetite, which, being limitless, traduce the ends of nature.

I would go along with that. I think that is very well put. I also think that while we can see this false progress clearly in certain changes, such as those of fashion, it can be a little more difficult in other places where mistakes are easy. For example, I remember once someone who was similarly opposed to false progress pointing out the folly of electric toothbrushes, which (in his mind) were simply a fad-ish high-tech way to do exactly what you could do without a machine at all. But then someone pointed out (a) there are people who CANNOT brush their teeth with their own muscles due to muscular problems, and (b) there are toothbrushes that do the job of cleaning teeth better than ANY manual brush can do it. Which are clearly teleologically oriented bases for using a machine for the job.

Any social disorder may be traced back to the disorders of the soul, but once a form of disorder has been loosed into society, the process becomes reciprocal, with a given mode of societal 'order' impressing itself upon the souls of its members, become the form of the soul.

Amen to that. One of the reasons we need the Church, in each age of man, to guide us out of the errors typical of the day.

Now it is true that in some cases we only realize these trade-offs in hindsight. But in others there were fair numbers of alarms raised, which unfortunately were ignored, usually for the sake of "progress," which generally reduces to money.

Rob, that's a good point. It is also the case that sometimes when alarms were raised, they were simply wrong, or mostly wrong. People have claimed that the widespread use of antibiotics (in hand soap, for example) was going to breed resistant strains of bacteria and we would be inundated with resistant diseases by 2010. Some claimed that computers were going to destroy the world as of January 1, 2000 because of Y2K programming errors. The government suggested that swine flu was going to incapacitate a third of the country and kill hundreds of thousands. The trick, then, is to know when to take the alarms seriously, and when to shrug them off as merely alarmist. And (perhaps most importantly) when to take them seriously enough to take steps to deal with the potential problems of a new technology while still employing the new technology anyway.

"I guess I'm still a little skeptical of the full weight of condemnation you're heaping on poor pitiful nostalgia."

Ditto. While my childhood was not idyllic (whose is?) there are certain aspects of it that I look back upon with a nostalgic fondness and sense of loss:

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem apparelled in celestial light..."

and all that.

Lydia, I'm not sure that Deneen means rejecting "the project in toto" in the way that you're taking it. I'd like to see him flesh that out a little more, however.

I'm sympathetic with PoMo only in those areas where it is in harmony with a traditionalist critique of modernism. Otherwise, I realize that postmodernism on the whole is simply modernism gone to seed.

...but it definitely allows for the possibility that the art and discipline of history can serve memory effectively. Right?

Absolutely. If memory is exercised, in its most exalted forms, in the remembrance of the events of sacred history, then surely the events of more mundane histories qualify, by analogy.

I'd agree, then, that unhomelikeness is a serious problem in our age. I just wonder what implications of this are. It would seem that the prescription for this ailment would be something akin to, "every man find a home and a church, a real place and real community; next, commit to it, cherish it, defend it and draw your resources from work in its service."

That would be the principal prescription, obviously. My contention, however, would be that it is fruitless and vain - futile and self-defeating in extremis - to regard personal and private responses to the decimation of community as sufficient unto the evils of the age. That would be to posit that each man is, or at least ought to be, an heroic superman, perpetually positing himself against virtually the entirety of his society, and that this state of affairs is, and ought to be, accepted as normative, that it would be, in some sense, illegitimate for men to act collectively to mitigate the nihilistic processes of destructive (de)creation, even when they manifestly have the power to do so. Moreover, the political economy of America, predicated as it is upon occult forms of usury and exploitation, outsourcing, the illusions of meritocracy, and the fantasies of globalization - a process entirely at variance with human nature, once we progress beyond the superficialities of cuisine, world music, and clothing, arriving at the little cosmions, the world-images of different cultures - deserves to be opposed, because it is bad for actually-existing Americans, as historically-situated human beings called to virtue and deserving of homelike places in this world. Ecrasez l'infame! Why should Americans be compelled to retrain ceaselessly, for an endless churn of employment? Because capital deems it more lucrative? Because it generates useless goods and services no one really needed, which are - of course - quite profitable? Why should - and this is the sick and sickening fantasy of some neoliberals in the wake of the financial crisis, and the failure of American housing policy - Americans become still more itinerant, still less rooted, a nation of short and medium-term renters? For the same reasons? Because it increases aggregate wealth? Because it enables the economic analogue of the cultural "freedumb" to determine for oneself the meaning of life, existence, and the universe? What is any of that by comparison to the integrity of a family's little cosmion?

This is no truculent opposition to private enterprise, but implacable opposition to the forms of certain private enterprises, not to mention certain American exercises in dirigisme.

There is, in my estimation, a clear analogy to financial innovation. It would be impossible, and therefore a rank, foul capitulation to the usurers, to endeavour to evaluate each alleged financial "innovation" individually, and on its own alleged merits. Not only would it be impossible to accurately assess the probable worth and consequences of these things, and under different conditions - this is an epistemic problem - but, at every stage along the route, the running dogs of such economic powers would bay that the very partiality of our knowledge creates a presumption in favour of innovation; surely, they will argue, we cannot predict the consequences of the deployment of this wonderful new instrument, but they may be fabulous, and so we must assume the risk. Wink, wink. From harsh experience we have learned that it is preferable by far to forgo some of the ostensibly beneficial innovations - assuming that there are any, which is an open question with me - in order to avoid the ones that are manifestly deleterious, these latter exceeding the former in both number and magnitude. So also with (de)creative destruction: much of it is not merely useless, but actively harmful, once we eschew the reductionistic focus upon quantitative measures. 'Twould be better to have less of it, methinks. The practical business of getting less of it is a matter of prudential, deliberative politics.

They will have no homes if their cities are deprived of productive business by the machinations of an intrusive state.

This is true enough. What is also true is that they will have no homes, save in the most nominal and worthless sense of that term, if they are deprived of them by relentless economic destruction, great movements of capital, speculative and arbitraging, always beyond their control. It is perhaps a fearful and terrifying thing, psychologically, to feel oneself governed by a arbitrary despot of a divinity, after the model of Allah; perhaps, though, one can please such a divinity, and garner his favour. It is more fearful still, I think, to be subjected to a process so impersonal, for there is nothing one can do to propitiate it; it is as inscrutable and remorseless as was fate for the ancients. And, to the extent that this process is personal, involving discrete individuals making discrete decisions to do X, Y, or Z, decisions having massive ramifications, these persons are always able to plead either impersonal necessity, or rational self-interest - and against these things, there is no defense, and from them, no recourse.

save in the most nominal and worthless sense of that term,

Hmmm. All my suspicions are raised by that qualifier.

All my suspicions are raised by that qualifier.

Really? All that matters is that one have a roof over one's head, such things as a degree of stability and predictability in one's life don't matter? Really?

"It is fruitless and vain - futile and self-defeating in extremis - to regard personal and private responses to the decimation of community as sufficient unto the evils of the age."

I never claimed either (a) that personal reform would be sufficient or (b) that finding, defending and building up a community is merely a personal and private endeavor. I'm not suggesting we become heroic supermen; only that we recognize the first baby steps, and take them, before committing to much more radical political programs.

As a practical matter, the welfare of most American cities is profoundly damaged when we elect political regimes that will fetter and penalize and bewilder small businesses. It will do no good, and probably a great deal of harm, to encourage this fettering in the hopes that it will include also a fettering of the machinations of Wall Street. As I've said before, in my judgment the statist threat to private enterprise (the perfectly legitimate variety composed of small businesses only very distantly tied to Wall Street) is very real, is made more grave by the broadening anti-business political climate, and is likely to only strengthen the monopolist powers rather than weaken them.

In a word, the current composition of political power in this country precludes any reasonable expectation that "unhomelikeness" will be alleviated by the legislative options on offer. Possibly some good will come out of the big financial regulatory reform. Other than that, the prospects are very dim until the composition of political power changes.

Let's note, also, that where the composition of political power is different -- say, Great Britain -- the prospects for creative solutions are much better. The UK seems to be well ahead of us in getting a better handle on banking, finance, and other matters; and this is in part because the (expected) shift in political power over there is not toward unreformed statism.

Paul, I don't really disagree with any of your points in the comment above, save, perhaps, at the margins. Many conservatives do believe, or do so appear to believe, that no serious structural reforms of American political economy are required. Many of them do not even believe that crapulent consumerism really is a virtue issue. Many of them, confronted by the errors of Obama's policies, or proposed policies, have valorized a fictive world of further deregulation, as witness the refusal to question America's trade policies (and the attendant fretting about "protectionism" as a dire threat, not even to America, but to the "global economy"), or the lunacy - which, predictably, reaches all the way to the Republican Congressional caucus - that opposes even timid financial regulation. And so on and so forth.

Consider it this way: after an economic crisis brought on, in part, by people, great and small, rich and poor, living way beyond their means, few are willing to question a political economy which encourages precisely this, in ways too numerous to mention.

We are a terminally unserious people.

That would be to posit that each man is, or at least ought to be, an heroic superman, perpetually positing himself against virtually the entirety of his society, and that this state of affairs is, and ought to be, accepted as normative,

Maximos, given that Lydia and I homeschool our children, I think we are keenly aware of the degree to which we are put in the position of constantly having to be counter-cultural - at least in the arenas that touch on education and child-rearing. I agree wholeheartedly with the stance that this sort of stand-up-and-fight-back attitude should not be the norm of wholesome living. It should be possible to live in a society where we can allow out kids to go to school, and to play with the school children in the neighborhood, and to not have them exposed (ha-hem) to pornography. Lydia particularly has faught to use the power of the social order and the government to rein in pornography. So yes, we are quite open to the prospect of the society generally and the government as its tool seeking to establish moral order and sane practices conducive to wholesome virtuous life.

I think where the disagreement comes in is with the appropriate ways to implement this vision. Your rhetoric seems to angle in the direction of using government to control business both in the large scale (by establishing the playing field) as well in the small scale, to more or less force business to live within a particular notion of permissible change that is narrow and to some degree arbitrary, or at least whose limits cannot be proven to be necessary for the common good.

I think that it is critical to ask on what moral basis society can decide to restrain private enterprise from its intended project on the basis of possible but not provable eventual long range harm. And on what criteria that prudential judgment passes from (a) may (with modest probability) eventually be a problem but society should leave the issue alone because the harm is too minimal or the probability too low; to (b) the enterprise MAY be restrained by society because the harm is more significant and/or more probable; to (c) society SHOULD interfere because the probable harm is large and/or very certain.

Have you ever noticed that there is no such thing as nostalgia in science? In science, progress is measure in really measurable terms: does the new theory/result explain things better than older results. In modern society, how can one measure such results? In science , one hopes to progress towards a more truthful representation of our understanding of nature. In society, one can hope to progress towards the City of God, but while all scientists believe in truth, not all society members believe in God, at least not in the same way. Some types of social progress are only for a season; some form or reform a society. As long as there is no common moral basis upon which to decide whether or not true progress has occurred, improvements will always occur as if by a random walk and nostalgia will be a wistful retracing of the staggering.

The Chicken

Maximos,

You can probably guess I don't find most of your arguments convincing, but rather than rehash those differences at the moment, I thought I'd instead direct your attention to this Scruton essay on architecture and beauty, as it deals with some of the same themes of this post:

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/december-2009/the-high-cost-of-ignoring-beauty

If I don't post a comment again before the 25th, God Bless and Merry Christmas.

Scruton is always worth reading; I wish more American conservatives were familiar with him.

I think that it is critical to ask on what moral basis society can decide to restrain private enterprise from its intended project on the basis of possible but not provable eventual long range harm. And on what criteria that prudential judgment passes from (a) may (with modest probability) eventually be a problem but society should leave the issue alone because the harm is too minimal or the probability too low; to (b) the enterprise MAY be restrained by society because the harm is more significant and/or more probable; to (c) society SHOULD interfere because the probable harm is large and/or very certain.

Society requires no exogenous moral basis for taking such decisions, should it, through its representative institutions, determine to do so; society has all of the warrant it requires from the fact that its provision of public goods - basic order, a system of law, courts, etc. - is what makes enterprise possible, for absent these, there would not only be no enterprise, but no civilization to speak of, only a Somalia-like state of chaos. Moreover, society cannot be obligated to extend the sanction, cover, and even endorsement of the laws to any activities bound to result in the fraying or dissolution of society; it is manifestly absurd to imagine that a society should defend certain persons in the performance of acts, the creation of institutions, or the possession of rights, where these things may redound to the detriment of that society, for such is to suppose, with all the solemnity of the absurd, that society must protect it destroyers.

There is an epistemic issue here, but I want to be perfectly clear on this account: there is no question of right here, but only of prudence. Society has every right to circumscribe activities deleterious to its actually-existing way of life, activities liable to suck the oxygen out of its little cosmion; whether any discrete circumscription is prudent is quite another question. Finally, I don't see why the presumption should be in favour of "engage in whatever innovations you desire, for the onus is on authority to prove it deleterious"; the presumption could just as easily fall in favour of the opposite formulation: "perpetuate inherited ways as you receive them, for the onus is on you should you wish to alter them." Understand, please, that I am not calling for any specific form of regulation, but pointing out that the justifications offered for creative destruction are meretricious and question-begging.

"perpetuate inherited ways as you receive them, for the onus is on you should you wish to alter them."

I'm sorry, but that just brings to mind _way_ too vividly the society in Anthem where you have to take any of your inventions to a board which decides whether to allow them to be used or whether to destroy them. They reluctantly allowed lamps (or was it candles?) a few years before the story opens; but they decide to destroy the electric light bulb.

Nope, I'm not going to buy that burden of proof claim.

Then at least let us be honest about what our political economy is, namely, a system in which our society underwrites creative destruction, which benefits its perpetrators principally, and everyone else indirectly, if at all, and then, on the back end, accepts the socialization of all the externalities. Or, more precisely, subsidizes by a variety of direct and indirect means a process of creative destruction perpetrated by certain people, the costs of which are borne by other people. We may be stuck with it, and we may benefit from it in some ways, but there's no real reason to romanticize, or fetishize as so many on the right do, a process that says, "You, over here, get to do really cool things, and you, over there, get to suffer them.".

Besides, the notion implicit in all of this, that somehow human creativity didn't exist, or failed to find any outlets, prior to the invention of the pleonexic economy, is risible. Creativity belongs to human beings as such, and it is a peculiarly modernist disease to argue that the existence or expression of some thing is contingent upon its maximization.

~~We may be stuck with it, and we may benefit from it in some ways, but there's no real reason to romanticize, or fetishize as so many on the right do, a process that says, "You, over here, get to do really cool things, and you, over there, get to suffer them.".~~

Max, just keep repeating "A rising tide raises all boats, a rising tide raises all boats..." Eventually you may convince yourself that it's true.

Actually, it's probably fair to say that most on the mainstream & neo right do not believe this mantra as quoted, but mentally add the phrase worth saving to the end of the thing, which is more insidious.

Lydia --

To me there is a important difference to keep in mind when talking about bringing an invention before some board to get it approved. (We do, of course, have a Broad of Patent Appeals.) A lamp or light bulb is a physical invention, the work of human hands shaping the stuff of the earth; what is a credit-default swap, or an IO-strip MBS, or a CDO-squared?

I'm really not dismayed by the picture of Wall Street quants being instructed to bring their new "products" before an expert board. Had someone with knowledge, intelligence and some foresight really examined the business model of AIG's Financial Products office in London, we might have avoided the biggest absorption of the private economy by government since the early 20th century.

I emphasize might. To Maximos I would query, what hope does the history of financial regulation by agencies of the state proffer to us? Not much. I mean, there is a basic problem in this question alone: Who will Treasury and the Fed hire when they receive from Congress authority to regulate credit derivatives? Why, they'll hire former traders and analysts from the banks and shadow banks. They could not possibly hope to fill out a new regulatory agency without hiring from the private sector.

At base we need moral and philosophical reform in order to restore the sanity to our economy. We have to rediscover, in a sense, what it means to own property.

To Maximos I would query, what hope does the history of financial regulation by agencies of the state proffer to us?

It depends upon the presuppositions of any such regulation. If it were to presupposes a healthier conception of property, one which increased logarithmically the skepticism applied to each increment of abstraction, and contemplated simply banning much of it, it would offer hope. On the other hand, if it presupposes that all of this stuff is prima facie legitimate, and must be proven, after the fact, to be dangerous or usurious, then it will be worthless. Even under the proposed regulation, the burden remains on society to demonstrate what is already manifest, namely, that 99.5% of financial innovation is usurious and socially useless, a mere moving around of rents within the parasite class; until society's representatives can prove to some faction of the quant class that a discrete innovation is bad, Wall Street gets to play. This is backwards. The burden of proof should go the other way: none of this stuff should be practiced until it can be proven innocuous or beneficial. Can't prove that the CDO-squared is harmless? Too bad, they're all invalidated.

More generally, it should be remembered that I work in a small family business, and we do - gasp! - innovate. In fact, we've pushed the technology of road-tube-based traffic counters further than it has ever been taken, probably as far as it will ever go. My argument is twofold: first, any proposed innovation, any alteration in the way we do things, should be required to justify its externalities, and should not adversely affect either the common good or the well-being of those immediately connected, in some way, to the alteration. With respect to externalities, the industrial production of livestock is one "innovation" that fails, as this practice not only altered the way of life of the countryside to no good purpose, but is on the cusp of reversing the antibiotic revolution of the past 60 years - one of the good things about the modern world - owing to the heavy use of antibiotics to treat animals subjected to bestial cruelties, which - unsurprisingly - make them sick. Thanks to industrial livestock production, we've essentially engineered the rapid evolution of drug-resistant bacteria, from which tens of thousands of Americans perish annually. We could follow the enlightened policies of Norway, and stringently control the dispensing of antibiotics, but that would mean the end of industrial livestock operations. Too bad. Preserving the viability of antibiotics, even setting aside the moral good of avoiding industrial-scale sadism practiced upon animals, is more important than whatever alleged goods arise from industrial production. With respect to the common good, and the well-being of those immediately affected by some "innovation", "virtual immigration" - the new econospeak term of art for offshoring - fails the test, as it not only exacerbates balance of trade problems, thus further exacerbating the financialization of the economy, the ruination of which we've already beheld, but worsens, without recourse, the prospects of entire swathes of the population.

Second, my argument is that against personal participation in the relentless and nihilistic churning of consumer trends, fashions, and ephemera. We do not need new clothing fashions year on year, new cars every three years, or that new widget, when the old one worked well enough. The point can be made more fine-grained than this, but the present statement should suffice: we should inquire whether we really need some thing, rather than buying it because it promises, with all of the superficial sheen of desire itself, to be biggerbetterfastermore.

Paul, he isn't just talking about invention of highly esoteric financial instruments with all sorts of legal implications. He's talking about invention generally. And notice that he didn't say what you said when I made my comment. Instead, he said that "in that case" (remember, this is in response to my rejection of the idea of a government board to decide whether or not to destroy new inventions, my rejection of a "burden of proof" for _all_ new inventions) we should admit various apparently bad stuff about our economy and our world.

And Paul, I hope you don't think there is any resemblance between the patent board and the committee in Anthem that smashes the light bulb, either in function or in intention. Perhaps you haven't read the book.

I haven't read it, Lydia, so I can't speak any resemblance. Bringing up the Patent Board is only to note that we do have institutions (useful ones!) where private inventions come before government boards for adjudication.

The financial instruments are important to this discussion because of how much they have come to dominate innovation in our form of capitalism.

Maximos, on industrial agriculture, I have a lot of sympathy for your position. That industrial agriculture firms are among the oldest and most dependent upon corporate welfare only strengthens my suspicion.

Paul, to counterbalance your "suspicions" about industrial agriculture, you might enjoy this article:

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals

W.r.t. "sadism" against animals, I especially appreciated the part about the 4,000 drowned free-range turkeys.

And AFAIK, it is no part of the mandate of the U.S. patent board to decide whether an invention will cause too much "creative destruction"--loss of jobs and the like--by drawing people to use it and changing the technological landscape "too much."

Maximos quotes Paul's excellent question - "what hope does the history of financial regulation by agencies of the state proffer to us?" - and then completely fails to answer it.

He writes: "it depends upon the presuppositions of any such regulation" etc.

OK, so what hope does the history of financial, or, for that matter, any other kind of regulation by agencies of the state proffer that it will ever end up being controlled by people who share the sort of presuppositions of which Maximos would approve?

I'd say about as much hope as I hold out for the coming of Plato's philosopher-king: i.e., none whatever.

Unless and until the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the enterprises they regulate can be completely and permanently closed, it seems worse than pointless to increase the powers of those agencies.

That's a very good article, Lydia. It's been years since I've read Hurst.

That article from the AEI site (consider the source!) has been distributed ad nauseum by BigAgri apologists, as if it's a "here endeth the lesson" type thing that manages in the space of a few pages to dispense with the arguments of Pollan, Berry, Matthew Scully, Mark Ritchie, Gary Holthaus, etc., all in one fell swoop. Which, frankly, is silly.

The guy who wrote the piece is perfectly free to run his farm the way he wants, just as I am perfectly free to avoid buying his product. The problem occurs when government and corporate collaboration puts pressure on farmers who don't want to farm that way to do so -- "get big or get out," in other words. Anyone who thinks this is 'free enterprise' is dreaming.

Unless and until the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the enterprises they regulate can be completely and permanently closed, it seems worse than pointless to increase the powers of those agencies.

I'm highly sympathetic to this argument, having made arguments in the past to the effect that the revolving door/lobbyist culture should be curtailed. As I recall, I was denounced as some sort of unhinged radical for my troubles.

As regards Hurst, I believe that Davies and Scherzer have his number.

As the debate over the economy goes on with Maximos, I think I've pinpointed the two key issues that keep popping up again and again:

1) We can't agree on the technical details -- or to put it another way -- we can't agree on the facts. Take this sentence from the combox above:

"Preserving the viability of antibiotics, even setting aside the moral good of avoiding industrial-scale sadism practiced upon animals, is more important than whatever alleged goods arise from industrial production."

Maximos is claiming that industrial agriculture will destroy the viability of anitbiotics (in fact he even goes on to claim that the use of industrial agriculture is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year RIGHT NOW). He also doesn't provide any links to scietific studies backing up this claim, so it is not surprisingly hard to evaluate such a radical statement of fact.

He is also claiming that we currently practice "sadism" against animals -- a claim that is more than factual as I'd want to know how he defines sadism (e.g. a committed vegetarian thinks killing ANY animal for food is sadism).

Finally, notice the sly perfunctory nod toward the "alleged goods" of industrial agriculture. Why only alleged, when you seem to have clear-cut factual knowledge that we are on the cusp of biological doom thanks to factory farms?

2) We can't agree on what it means to be human. This is obviously the bigger problem and is encapsulated nicely in this paragraph:

"Second, my argument is that against personal participation in the relentless and nihilistic churning of consumer trends, fashions, and ephemera. We do not need new clothing fashions year on year, new cars every three years, or that new widget, when the old one worked well enough. The point can be made more fine-grained than this, but the present statement should suffice: we should inquire whether we really need some thing, rather than buying it because it promises, with all of the superficial sheen of desire itself, to be biggerbetterfastermore."

Now, as a statement of prudent advice on how to manage a family budget, I can get behind the sentiment of the above paragraph. But as a statement on how a market economy works, and how human desire works it is nonsense. Point to any technological innovation made since the dawn of civilization and one could say something like "why did you need to build X, when you used to get along fine in life with just X-1"? We are creatures with intelligence and God created to use that intelligence -- which means we should want to develop mastery of the natural world as best we can, within the limits God laid out in the Bible (i.e. we can't use technology to kill people, steal their property, etc.) What you need and what I need will always be different and any attempt to regulate these needs (again, beyond moral limits) seems somehow inhuman -- more Rousseau, Marx and Lenin and all the rest of the Enlightenment revolutionaries who claim to know the 'General Will' and will impose it on you and me for our own good.

Obviously, with regard to the incompatibility of routinely dosing animals with antibiotics, so as to preserve them in life while brutalizing them, and the antibiotic revolution, I got my information from Prof. Otto Yerass. Studies have repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated a causal relation between industrial agriculture and the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, though this is not the only cause - there is also the overprescription of antibiotics in the human population.

I think that Matthew Scully, among others, has amply described the sadism of our relationship with the animal kingdom. Perhaps you should read Dominion.

What you need and what I need will always be different and any attempt to regulate these needs (again, beyond moral limits) seems somehow inhuman -- more Rousseau, Marx and Lenin and all the rest of the Enlightenment revolutionaries who claim to know the 'General Will' and will impose it on you and me for our own good.

Yeah, yeah, Marx, Lenin, Rousseau, blah, blah, blah. No one is proposing totalitarianism, except in the fevered delusions of those who will brook no effective social restraints upon desire. What some of us are proposing, is that not desire, but rightly-ordered, rightly-governed desire is expressive of the human telos; that what we are debating is precisely the location of that moral limit beyond which desire and its consequences must be regulated; and that mastery of the environment does not entail the liceity of any given, particular system of mastery - that any increase in the quanta of mastery is not its own justification, and that it is the quality of mastery, and not mere degree, that matters.

As I recall, I was denounced as some sort of unhinged radical for my troubles.

No, Maximos, I denounced you as an unhinged radical for implying--clearly and unequivocally, despite your later denials--a moral equivalence between this relationship between lobbying and politics on the one hand and Governor Blagojevich's despicable corruption in blatantly selling Senate seats on the other. I was not the only one (nor the only one among our present or past blog colleagues) to think this bizarre and, to say the least, not one of your finest moments, so it is hardly useful to your present cause for you to bring it up and remind me of your immense talent for moral equivalence-mongering. It was a post that made me very angry at the time and still does whenever I think of it. Most of the time, I try not to.

Rob G says,

The guy who wrote the piece is perfectly free to run his farm the way he wants, just as I am perfectly free to avoid buying his product. The problem occurs when government and corporate collaboration puts pressure on farmers who don't want to farm that way to do so -- "get big or get out," in other words. Anyone who thinks this is 'free enterprise' is dreaming.

Rob G., a lot depends on what you have in mind with said "collaboration." As we've discussed on other threads, if you mean real, unequivocal, direct subsidies, I'm happy to ditch them, though I imagine the small farmer might suffer from such ditching as well as the large. If you mean merely allowing big agriculturalists _like every other business in the country_ to deduct their transportation expenses and be taxes only on their net rather than their gross profits, then I don't acknowledge that this is a subsidy or a "get big or get out" message nor in any way, shape, or form contrary to free enterprise, and those who suggest that thus being even-handed and not _penalizing_ the big merely for being big is somehow a "subsidy" and an attempt to put "pressure" on small farmers will make not the slightest, tiniest, headway with me.

But in any event, the article is about the allegations of sadism and deliberately keeping animals alive in order to brutalize them and all the other hysteria, very much of the sort we're hearing from Maximos right now. The article isn't about whether the author and all other farmers should or shouldn't receive federal subsidies or about various government approaches that (allegedly) force other farmers to "get big or get out." It's about the claims that they are bad, immoral people because they mistreat their animals. And for that purpose, I think it does a darned good job, and I thank the reader who sent it to me, because I wouldn't have known about it otherwise.

Jeff Singer, you go here! Good job.

Oh, and Rob G--If Maximos had his way, the guy who wrote the article would _not_ be "perfectly free to run his farm the way he wants." And you can bet the farm on that.

Maximos,

Thanks for the link to the antibiotic guy. I'll check it out, but remember, you stated rather matter of factly and forcefully, as if there was no debate about the matter, that industrial agriculture was literally killing thousands of us every year. If Professor Yeras is correct, and is the final authority on this question -- why isn't the CDC and various interest groups demanding right now that we end the use of animal antibiotics? If the scientific link is rock solid, not only should we stop right now using these antibiotics, we should slaughter and burn every animal full of antibiotics as if they had some form of Mad Cow's disease -- remember, thousands are dying!

As for this:

"What some of us are proposing, is that not desire, but rightly-ordered, rightly-governed desire is expressive of the human telos what we are debating is precisely the location of that moral limit beyond which desire and its consequences must be regulated; and that mastery of the environment does not entail the liceity of any given, particular system of mastery - that any increase in the quanta of mastery is not its own justification, and that it is the quality of mastery, and not mere degree, that matters."

Agreed -- but be careful as an increase in quanta can lead to an increase in quality of life (e.g. the fact that we can make clothes cheaply in factories means that women don't need to spend as much time, if any, making and repairing clothes at home and they therefore have more time to homeschool their kids, write poetry, pursue intellectual interests, etc.)

Even if the treatment of farm animals does not always rise to the level of sadism (although in some cases I'd say it does), at very least it's rotten stewardship, hence sinful, and subsidized rotten stewardship at that. Maximos recommended Scully's book Dominion. I was going to make the same recommendation but he beat me to it.

"It's about the claims that they are bad, immoral people because they mistreat their animals."

Yep. And if they do, in fact, mistreat their animals then they are bad, immoral people, at least as touching on that behavior. 25 cats locked in a filthy house, wallowing in excrement is "cruelty to animals." A couple thousand sheep locked in a filthy quonset hut, wallowing in excrement is "farming." Go figure.

As far as farming in general goes, I suggest you read Gary Holthaus's From the Farm to the Table to get some idea of the collaboration I'm speaking of. If you're really a conservative, and not just a libertarian in a populist costume, parts of it should make your head want to explode.


No, Maximos, I denounced you as an unhinged radical for implying--clearly and unequivocally, despite your later denials--a moral equivalence...

Which wasn't my claim. My claim was that they were two species under the same genus, that genus being the illicit conflation of public and private goods. And, bizarrely, there were commentators in that thread arguing that the revolving door/lobbying culture must be okay because it's legal - which is a piece of dimestore positivism they'd not tolerate elsewhere - or that it's just swell, morally speaking, in and of itself.

After the effects of the revolving door on our political economy, via the Great Recession, I'd say that I've been vindicated.

In spades.

As I said, despite your denials. I believed then and believe now that the post speaks for itself. But it would have been a lot less exciting just to write about what's wrong with what you call the "revolving door" and what, concretely, you propose to do to change it. With which I would likely also have disagreed. But without the, "I can't believe he's saying this" feeling of outrage, because the whole thing wouldn't have had the outrageous aspect which, in fact, it did have.

But I wish you hadn't brought it up or that I had had the restraint not to respond, because it's not a good note on which to end 2009. Happy New Year, Maximos. Best wishes to you and all of yours for 2010.

Maximos,
It is a great honor to welcome you into the ancient and hermetic order of the shrill. :)

I receive my induction as an honour!

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