Comments
Alan recommends this link to the New Republic today, with this comment:

I have no sympathy with this guy's attack on "the left and its candlelight
vigils," or for the jingoism that the New Republic has displayed in the last
couple of issues. Robert Fisk is a journalist who has my particular
admiration for having once picked up the pieces of an exploded shell that
had killed two Palestinian women, noting the serial number and
manufacturer's name, and taking it back to the engineer who had designed it.
I'm just curious about what you guys think about what he has to say about
the embargo on Iraq & its effects on the civilian population thereof. What
he says sounds plausible to someone like me who is shamefully uninformed
about the issue.
BTW, Roger, great post today.

Lorin wrote, re the tears post:

"That is wonderful. You know Jean Starobinski has a big chapter on Rousseau and
the political meaning of tears in HmmHmm and Transparency?"

Which I didn't. Google search reveals that to be Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, 1988).

I'm planning, this week, to do two or three posts on The Earthquake of Lisbon, with references to the Current Crisis. I thought I'd prepare my faithful readers.

Now, my thoughts have been straying to the literature about the Lisbon earthquake ever since the collapse of the WTC. Some might say that comparing the two situations is unsound -- the Lisbon quake was a natural event, the WTC assault was thoroughly man-made. What I am hunting for, though, is not an exact comparison of the events themselves, but of their effects on the cultural mood.

The Enlightenment was a definite cultural mood -- a mix of sentiment and intellectual habits self-consciously promoted by an amorphous group with definite self-selecting initiatory practices and habits. One of its most salient features was the optimism that came from the at first muted, and then more self-confident, announcement of modernity -- modernity as a virtue, modernity that dared to speak its name. This was the kind of thing savaged by Swift in Tale of the Tub, with passages like this one:

"When I consider how exceedingly our illustrious moderns have eclipsed the weak glimmering lights of the ancients, and turned them out of the road of all fashionable commerce, to a degree, that our choice town wits,[1] of most refined accomplishments, are in grave dispute, whether there have been ever any ancients or no in which point we are like to receive wonderful satisfaction from the most useful labours and lucubrations of that worthy modern, Dr. Bentley: I say, when I consider all this, I cannot but bewail, that no famous modern hath ever yet attempted an universal system in a small portable volume of all things that are to be known, or believed, or imagined, or practised in life."

Swift's satire predicts an enterprise he would have heartily disapproved of -- The Encyclopedia. What was happening in Swift's time, and Montesquieu's, and Voltaire's, was a distinct change in Time-sentiment. The past, with its source, literally, in paradise, was slowly losing its position as the ultimate arbitor of legitimacy. The belief in the Garden at the beginning of the world was wilting. This transformation entailed a further transformation in the perception of the modern -- it became not the unfolding of the fall, but an interval within an inevitable progress. An interval that had to anchor its organization in something beyond precedent. This something, of course, was reason.

Although a culture is greater than the people who write the books and attend court functions, it is this change in time-sentiment and the definite set of assumptions, the overriding mood of optimism, which concerns me -- or will, for the next couple of posts. From such events as the Battle of the Books (to which Swift refers -- a controversy that started in France, with the querelle des anciens et des modernes that whirled around Perrault's address to the Acadamie Francais in 1670, but which truly found a language and an attitude around 1720, and began to be attacked around 1760. The Lisbon Earthquake happened on November 1, 1755. It isn't too far fetched to connect the change in mood with the event.

While the 90s certainly do not form an epoch, the optimism of the 90s, at least from 96 on, was also unmistakeable. Granted, cultural moods are hard to define, hard to test, and easy to get wrong. They are supremely soft objects -- fuzzy parameters. But anybody who trolls through an internet search on Google can find the ruins and monuments of that time, from the 30,000 Dow people to the bleached bones of biztech zines featuring teen millionaires. If the phrase, "America is changed forever," is being repeated like a zombie mantra by every perky pundit within hearing distance of a tv mike, that doesn't mean the phrase is wholly wrong (although I am always reminded, when I use a cliche, of what Leon Bloy said in Exegese des lieux communs -- cliches are only true when you read them through a mirror, darkly). There's a change in the air, though, we all know it, even if everything isn't changed, changed utterly. The optimism is gone. While it is too soon to call this pessimism, it feels ominous, like an alcoholic's thirst for the next binge. We have gone back to sucking down the biles and salts of the Reagan era, the stupid prejudices and kneejerk patriotism, even though we know, in the back of our minds, that this is not a good idea. Yes, it isn't a good idea, people. The modish word in the 90s was smart -- smart business, smart tech, smart people, etc., ad nauseum. Think: when was the last time you heard someone use smart like that? It is a small thing, but when a term disappears from the population of buzz words, there's usually a reason.