Other forms of intellectual enquiry seek to determine which propositions are true. Metaphysics seeks to determine what it is for them to be true. (Thought and Reality, p23)This meant that metaphysics had
to unravel the nature of propositions – of the thoughts we are capable of thinking.(ibid.)But Dummett did not believe we needed to stop there, and he provided over the years many explorations into the question of time, of ethics, and indeed of the existence of God, for which he resuscitated the usually scoffed-at argument of Berkeley. I'll add parenthetically that I consider this ability to make use of discarded and discredited arguments one of the signs of the catholicity of thought that philosophy requires--a feeling at ease with the whole stream of the millennia-long conversation and an indifference (which is not the same as hostility) to contemporary trends.
It is by no means obvious that universities...should support philosophy but for historical precedent. If universities had been an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied? It seems very doubtful.Dummett attributed the continuing existence of philosophy departments to the inertia of tradition; but as the last few years have shown, when pressed down against the bottom line with the heel of the call for "results" on their throat, universities will be ready to cut loose from tradition without thinking twice.
Liturgy is an art form; one especially in the service of God, but an art form none the less.... [I am] one who for many years longed for the liturgy to be translated into the vernacular; and I was sustained by the thought that, when it happened, it would be carried out by people who would have such sensitivity to language.... Alas, it has been carried out by people with tin ears both for English and for Latin, who moreover thought themselves entitled to revise the liturgy when it did not please them, not just to translate it.(This sort of thing will get knowing nods from the choir, and raise a "huh?" of incomprehension for the rest; that's fine.) Dummett did not restrict himself to questions of liturgical style. He defended the doctrine of Real Presence (while criticizing the Thomistic presentation thereof); he argued against the Roman church's position on contraception; he criticized modern philosophers for "worshiping" science and insisted that (as Ombhurbhuva reminded me in a comment on the last post)
the price of denying that God exists is to relinquish the idea that there is such a thing as how reality is in itself.Dummett's colleague Philippa Foot, a professed atheist, recounted in an interview (included here) that she once asked him,
“What happens when your argument goes one way and your religious belief goes the other?” And he said, “How would it be if you knew that something was true? Other things would have to fit with it.”But Dummett insisted his faith had experienced long periods of doubt, often brought on by reflection on the problem of evil, which, as he wryly conceded in his Gifford lectures, gave the atheists "a local argumentative advantage." In an autobiographical essay included in the book The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, he gives an account that will sound familiar to anyone who has done any of this wrestling:
I have undergone several periods when I have been overcome by such doubts; during them, I have not ceased to attend Sunday Mass, but have abstained from the sacraments. My doubts have always been global rather than local; my reasons for believing in God are philosophical rather than affective; they can suddenly strike me as unconvincing. ...But most usually my doubts have been engendered by what troubles everyone: can a world in which such suffering occurs be one made by a God who is said to love?...That world looks as if governed by uncaring forces. The pain of animals is a good example ...As for human pain, it is not its mere occurrence that has usually troubled me: after the Cross, no one can say to God, ‘You don’t know what it is like.’ ...What troubles me most is the way some people die. Some deaths are too devoid of dignity or peace to allow any self-surrender; how can they be the means by which anyone’s soul is supposed to pass into eternity?Dummett did not shy from the matter:
I have no answer to these questions; they trouble me continually. It has been only sporadically, and not for a long time now, that they have overwhelmed me and prevented me for a period from being a whole-hearted believer. When the period has ended and my faith in God has been restored, it has not been because I have found the answers, but because I have become able to live with the agony of not knowing them, confident that they are to be found...I remain a Catholic, and hope to die one.Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on this Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth. So that at the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It was in this same night that has just passed, that a multitude of the heavenly host appeared before the shepherds at Bethlehem, saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men'; at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross.Eliot has Beckett remark to his flock, "Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion." But indeed, this is what the Church does every Sunday.
Gloria in excelsis Deoare of course the declaration of the angels before the shepherds, which Eliot has Beckett cite from Luke 2:14 (it can also be "peace to men of good will," depending on your translation). Commencing its worship with this phrase, the Church is already doing what it later declares expressly, "joining with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven," with which words the Mass proceeds to declare
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis,
Sanctus, Sanctus, SanctusThe Sanctus comes as the final words of the preface for the Eucharistic prayer. That is: the Mass identifies the Church with the angelic choir, implicitly at its beginning, and again explicitly at the beginning of the Eucharist proper. There is thus a sense in which the Church is, with every Mass, recapitulating the distance and the conjunction between Christmas and Holy Week; and this sense is in some wise bound up with its angelic vocation.
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace p 181)This is a motif that runs through Havel's work from Letters to Olga to his many late addresses, collected in The Art of the Impossible. In the wake of Havel's death I have been turning this distinction over in my mind. I have said before that philosophy is in some sense optimistic, but Havel's "hope" is far closer to what I mean.
transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable sign in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can't--unlike Christians, for instance--say anything concrete about the transcendental.In pointing beyond the horizon of the world to indicate the unspecifiable grounds of hope, I suspect that Havel is following in the steps of his friend Jan Patočka, whose essay "Negative Platonism" (included here) tries to show that the Socratic orientation of philosophy towards a horizon was inherent in thinking itself. Havel's reticence, his confessed inability to "say anything concrete," is the fitting response to a hope whose articulation would seem to take us even beyond the premises of the meaningful; and Havel is right to gently chide Christians who have been far too ready to wax loquacious on the street address of God, though it is difficult to see how one might entirely avoid "saying too much" here. Havel himself seemed to hold out interest in the Gaia hypothesis and the Anthropic principle, proposals which certainly risk at least as much in the way of trespassing beyond the articulable, at least when explicitly connected to "the transcendental."
Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power. But though one may be in this reminded of the Gospels, it is not really the same thing at all. The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. Here I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. (Tolkien, Letters, #181)Tolkien was of course a Roman Catholic and accepted some measure of our capacity to be explicit about hope, but this explicitness in the end turns out to be always framed by liturgical language and action. Art, he insisted, could not sustain the link between hope and the primary world; it required routing through the imagination.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFrom imprisoned dissident to president of his country, Havel could have seen the course of his life as a pure vindication. But for millions of human beings who had the misfortune to, say, die in prison (Patočka was one) before the Velvet Revolution, this eventual historical denouement made no difference--at least none we dare name; the very attempt would tip us over into kitsch. The stature of Havel's character is shown by the fact that he knew very well, after his success, that such "turning out well" meant nothing in terms of hope. What counted was the surety--the faith--that it made sense. But the nature of that "sense" cannot be specified. One can at best try to hazard its grammar, not its content.
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"
Holism has now evolved from a formerly minority position into a sort of universally accepted cracker barrel wisdom, good for scoring easy points on fossilized and oppressive reactionary patriarchs who are supposedly naive enough to miss the way in which “everything is connected.” The problem is that this is an idea once but no longer liberating. Ideas have lifespans just like humans, and just like humans they can fall into a robotic decadence. My wager, as Badiou would put it, is that interconnectivity is a spent force, and that the intellectual theme of our time will be the recovery of a more robust and weirder model of autonomous individual things.
At what point does death pass from something inevitable and therefore quite acceptable to something violent and therefore more unacceptable [?]This question intersected in my mind with a passage I recently encountered in François Jullien's The Silent Transformations. Jullien has seemingly become the Sinologist these days, at least in certain philosophical circles; I do not know what Asian studies departments make of him. His many books translated so far all tend to run the compare-&-contrast ploy: here's what our Western philosophical tradition, inherited from the Greeks, makes of such-&-such a matter; and what does the Chinese tradition say? In The Silent Transformations, the issue is the nature of change, and Jullien argues that Chinese thought tends to regards change as far more gradual and less catastrophic; and this has rendered Chinese philosophy more sensitive not only to small and incremental change, but also to processes that are cumulative and ultimately transformational.
To put it bluntly, there is even an inversion between Greek and Chinese thought in this respect, and the latter opens up an initial breach.... on the one hand Aristotlean nature, the phusis, is conceived as being a subject-agent: it 'wants', 'aims', 'undertakes', is 'ingenious' and sets up 'goals'. The Chinese sage or strategist on the ohter hand displays no ambition other than to 'transform' just as nature does (hua is their master word). (The Silent Transformations, pp 8-9)I am by disposition suspicious of overarching accounts of "Chinese" or "Japanese" or "Indian thought", just as much as I am of "Greek" or "French" (There is as much difference between Kitaro Nishida and Kukai as there is between Malebranche and Deleuze), so I take all this with a bit of whatever cross-cultural seasoning is appropriate. (I note, e.g., that Jullien refers specifically to Aristotle, but contrasts him with the generic "Chinese sage or strategist.") I hasten to add that I am radically unqualified to question Jullien's scholarship; I merely protest that a culture rich enough to inspire a scholarship of such caliber must have more texture and variation to it that the repetition of what I can't help but consider cliches. After all, the various disputes between rival schools of Confucianism (let alone between Mohists, Buddhists, and so on) were certainly experienced by participants to be substantive disagreements. I raise my eyebrows when I come across a question like this one about the process of human ageing:
Would not this constant and silent passage which constitutes ageing, as undeniable as it is, teach us more about life itself; does it not definitely already let us glimpse what is effective, so widespread and discreet is it that it is ordinarily imperceptible, about all we project and busily construct about the End? But European philosophy has no less placed death as the gleam on the horizon, as a culminating, fascinating and apocalyptic point, towards which everything converges and will be suddenly resolved: the place where, tearing aside the veil, the anticipated Truth is finally to be revealed.... If philosophy had transferred its attention to the transition of ageing, as something which we are nevertheless faced with everywhere and which has always already started, it would undoubtedly have refrained from making death a point of scrutiny which definitively cuts off everything, an invitation, in a great game of double or nothing, to the wager of Faith or rather to the tragic hardening. It would have approached death as the ultimate result--the avatar--of ageing that begins so soon, no longer as a Rupture and a leap into the Indescribable, but in the dependency and continuation of ageing....it would cease to be an enigma and become an epilogue. (pp 58-9)Suffice it to say that I have my doubts as to whether death is experienced as a non-enigmatic "epilogue" across the whole of Chinese philosophy.
Morton’s point seems to be that non-violence is the key to existence for any object: an object can only continue to exist if it is able to get along with itself and with others. This means that inconsistencies are not cancelled out but rather multiplied and amplified. It is the proliferation of inconsistencies that permit an expanding co-existence to take place. Violence, it seems to me, becomes a kind of icing on the non-violent cake of being. While non-violence is what makes being possible, that very being itself sustains a variety of violent encounters. In a sense, to the extent that the encounter between two objects is always between a real object and a sensual object – between a subject and a caricature – every encounter contains an inevitable violent dimension. The idea, then, that somehow the ontological necessity of non-violence for being translates into the possibility of perfectly non-violent existence seems to be difficult to uphold. ...How do I avoid merging the recognition that violence is an inevitable feature of the world (it also has an ontological foundation in the caricaturing that goes on in all inter-objective relations) with the idea that, therefore, violence should simply be accepted?Ling's question is the same one that is made pressing (and left unresolved) by the Bhagavad-Gita.
Badiou's thesis deliberately blurs essential distinctions between realms of discourse—could be put as well to Plato (a point they concede in advance); but this is, I maintain, a constituent practice of philosophy, not a regrettable lapse of good philosophical discrimination but one half of philosophical praxis. The other half, of course, is knowing what one is doing, and continuing to make the "essential distinctions" which are nonetheless blurred. It must be said that Badiou reiterates these distinctions with a rare degree of articulation. If I think he lapses, it not in blurring the distinctions, for which the Nirenbergs fault him, but in doing so with too guilty of a conscience.
in which contingent aspects of mathematical models are used to reach cosmological or ontological conclusions.They point, e.g., to Glaucon's discussion of the "nuptial number" at Republic 545 &c. I on the other hand hold that the account of political justice, or cosmogenesis, or the relation between word and object, in terms of mathematics or cookery or what have you is an echo of an archaic-&-perennial consciousness whose critique and defense are the twin sides of the proper vocation of philosophy. I therefore do not regard the "snares" in the symptomatic a priori objectionable terms used by the Nirenbergs; indeed I do not see such moves as "reaching conclusions" at all; I see them as being suggestive and pointing beyond the articulable realm. (Their example is a case in point, as would be obvious if they paused to consider—among other things—that it is Glaucon not Socrates who makes this argument)
insofar as [Badiou's] mathematical ontology disguises the contingent in robes of necessity, it can only diminish our freedom. We can embrace the politics if we so wish. But we should not confuse this choice with mathematics, nor can we call it philosophy.I have my doubts about this whole formulation, and Bartlett and Clemens do a fair job of explaining why one might be forgiven for thinking the first sentence naïve. I am not concerned with the naïveté, but with the tendentiousness. The implication is that Badiou has either deceived himself or hopes to deceive us into "confusing" politics with mathematics. Confusion is not the same as "blurring," or, to have recourse to an over-used but still pertinent word, problematizing, a discursive boundary. As I have elsewhere argued, it may be permissible to question Badiou's philosophy's claim to the title platonism. But it is pretty staggering to suggest that his platonism does not deserve the title of philosophy.
Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)The Book of Common Prayer (ECUSA) contains a rubric specifying that "All Saints' Day may always be observed on the Sunday following November 1, in addition to its observance on the fixed date." This is an unusual feature; All Saints' is the only Feast of which this double observation is permitted. It is the last major feast of the Church Year; the day when the Church celebrates the company of all the Holy (i.e., the Church itself). (As is usually the case, "scholars are divided," but there are reasons to believe that in some parts of the pre-Christian world, this day marked the New Year.) I do not say that the Church intended the meanings which I find in this curious rubric (and I have not been able to ascertain how venerable it is--it may go back only to the preparatory materials for the '79 Prayer Book), but I think one may read an eschatological significance in the fact that, in this way, the Feast can be seen as bracketing the "ordinary time" of the week, falling on November 1 and then recurring on the Eighth Day of the week, the day of eternity. The Feast's temporal bivalence underscores the way the ontology of the Church is fundamentally eschatology: the Church itself, "the company of all blessed people," is the kingdom that is both coming, beyond the horizon of chronology, and is also now here. To use language that is a bit misunderstood these days, the Church Suffering is the Church Triumphant.
The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be.... [A]fter America’s post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow.... Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate. …So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn’t understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.Where Rushkoff may lose you is when he opines that the best thing that could happen is for the economy to really tank; not to close a couple of firms and send some folks to prison and have the Dow Jones lose a couple of percentage points, but for the market to fall 70-80%. Only then, he thinks, will we be able to rebuild an economy that serves human beings. Here is where Samuel Smith demurs, pointing out that the likely fallout from such a real collapse would be far, far scarier than anything we have witnessed; it would likely mean the unraveling of what people like to call the social fabric. It's not Smith disagrees with Rushkoff's analysis; it's just that he thinks Rushkoff's medicine might be worse than the disease:
Truth be told, “Ponzi scheme” is a mild descriptor for our current hegemony, and there are lots of people who deserve worse punishment than they’re likely to get.... My pragamatic side can’t get past the path from Point A to Point B, though.... If we “let it die,” yes, it will be hard times for “hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers.” It will also be tough on a lot of other people.... people are going to die. Lots of people. Children are going to starve to death in the streets. Maybe your children, but if not, almost certainly the children of someone you know. And since America is so central to the global economy, let’s try not to imagine what happens in areas that are already impoverished. If we’re lucky enough, at some point, to emerge from this holocaust, it’s pure fantasy to assert that a “real economy” is what results.Now I would mention that some folks, like James Howard Kunstler, ArchdruidJohn Michael Greer, and Derek Jensen, have been saying for while a while now that this scarier something is coming whether we like it or not. (Smith cites Kirkpatrick Sale, another articulate doomsayer, but he sees far more common ground between Sale and Rushkoff than I do.) I have some reservations about these dour expectations--mainly because I think that when it comes to prognostication, the first and last word was said by Yogi Berra: "it's hard to predict, especially the future"--but I'll admit to being very pessimistic about the ecological long-term. It's also true that the dire warnings of chaos and mob rule are a trusty standby for One-Percenters who want to scare the rest of us into not fucking with things. (The specter of social anarchy and mob rule will sooner or later be invoked against OWS.)
a socio-economic-political game of calvinball in which those who have the most constantly change and rework the rules to make sure that no matter what happens, all wealth and opportunity is shipped up to the most well-off. As long as the middle-class was given new episodes of Friends and shiny SUVs to distract them, the whole thing could be masked. But now the shifting of wealth has undermined their expectations.There's a lot in those little words "but now." What follows here is my take, not Gimbel's. What "But now" means is that it's no longer working--not just for the traders and racketeers atop the ladder, but for me and you. Implicit in this is that if we're just now waking up to the atrocious riggedness of the game, we weren't paying attention before. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by shiny SUVs and episodes of Friends. Even now, the would-be clever observation is raised that the activists are working away on iPhones and laptops, broadcasting their protests via the gadgets made by the corporate culture they decry. After you eliminate the smugness from this red-herring, there remains a little whiff of pertinence, and that pertinence inheres in the fact that we are indeed implicated in what we protest. We, too, are responsible. If we are honest, we can see this is the case whether you've been long-time champions of the cause going back to the '60s or before; or whether, like me, you've fought a long and losing fight against apolitical cynicism, or whether you didn't even realize until your city got Occupied that anything was wrong. (O.K., are there any of those?)
a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of theirdepression.Thus the lack of a Mubarak or a Qadaffi for whose head to call is only a small part of what makes "demands" hard to enumerate here. More to the point is that we lack even a language for imagining a different set of values. What could we possibly want, in a country where, after all, we "have the right" to protest?!
We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it.
While we will find characters to blame for one thing or another, most of corporatism’s architects have long since left the building—and even they were usually acting with only their immediate, short-term profits in mind. Our object instead should be to understand the process by which we were disconnected from the real world and why we remain disconnected with it. This is our best hope of regaining some relationship with terra firma again. Like recovering cult victims, we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatists society. Only then can we begin dismantling it and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.(Life, Inc.p xxv)
This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, war, terrorism, and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.The invention of a language for our discontent is properly a philosophical matter. It is akin to what Nietzsche called a transvaluation of values.
Open and Closed SpacesWhat I love here, among other things, is the way the poem revises itself. The gorgeous and dangerous way in which the terms that are introduced as a figure of speech in one line become substantive in the next. E.g., the way "...like a glove" (a simile) in line one leads on to the gloves (real gloves this time) being "laid aside" in line two, and then in line three they shift again from passively lying on the shelf to "suddenly grow[ing]" to dramatic proportions. A single word--in a mere simile, at that, that most garden-variety of figures of speech--has in three lines taken over and "black[ed] out the whole house"! This pattern continues, with "house" this time: the house is next seen from without, "away out among the winds." These winds will now (without ever being expressly mentioned again by name) shape what comes next: the whisper in the grass, the kite in the air, the clouds and their shadows. But the wind bloweth where it listeth. The poem refuses to be bound by its previous figures; at every step, the law previously laid down is amended. Thus the grass whispers "amnesty," (the law is not binding), but then the motion of the poem veers upwards from being so close to the ground: the boy sprints, a line slants up into the sky; a dream, "like a kite" but huge, introduces the first overtly temporal term ("the future") into a poem that has hitherto been dominated by the spatial; we are transported to a mountaintop; and in the last three lines, one sees the poem overtly correcting itself: what seemed to be steady is in fact in motion. And every closed space can open up. What the poem describes, it enacts.
A man feels the world with his work like a glove.
He rests for a while at midday having laid aside the gloves on the shelf.
There they suddenly grow, spread
and black-out the whole house from inside.
The blacked-out house is away out among the winds of spring.
'Amnesty,' runs the whisper in the grass: 'amnesty.'
A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky
where his wild dream of the future flies like a kite bigger than the suburb.
Further north you can see from a summit the blue endless carpet of pine forest
where the cloud shadows
are standing still.
No, are flying.
(tr. Robin Fulton)
The day after she died somebody close to her dreamed that she flew off with iridescent dragonfly wings (I got the email about this dream the day after her death). Yesterday at the funeral (under a big tent outdoors), one enormous, singular dragonfly flew around, and perched above the podium for the entire event.It is hard to know "what to do" with stories like this, and this very incapacity is why they are invaluable. Not because they demonstrate irrefutably the bankruptcy of "the materialist world view;" and not because they show how desperately we narrativize and pattern-seek to gain a shadow of 'meaning' at any cost. Rather, because their experiential force is such that we cannot dismiss them, and yet they just won't slip easily into any preordained category. If we seize on them as "evidence" of something, we slip into superstition. But if we blow them off, we do violence to ourselves. (Many are indeed prepared to bite the bullet and do this, but the cost of this is the chemical gelding of their souls. What they see as tough-mindedness I see as the intellect on steroids--and courting analogous side-effects). The only rational and human (I will even say "faithful") stance is one that sees in them as what Heraclitus said: "The God whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign." This sign is not glossable (if it were, it would be "speaking"). It points us beyond this world, but not at the world's expense.
There is a secret link between this fear and the boredom we spoke of earlier: boredom secretes fear as a kind of attempt at self-cure. One can see this quite clearly in contemporary western culture, which has grown more fearful as it has grown more secure, for the periodic upsettings of security become more traumatic and they leave a viral half-life of unsettling phantoms, traumatic enough to drive one back into the arms of a comfortable boredom, in a terrible cycle.This, a propos last post, where I was voicing my expectation that the blah-banal ironism of the '90s will make its resurgence as the "trauma" of 9/11 fades. This ennui should also serve as a palliative while America dwindles into the twilight of its historical significance.
