"If you want to be a patron, be a patron. Don't kid yourself that you're running a business."

"Even when print was profitable, TNR and magazines like it weren't," says Virginia Postrel, criticizing Chris Hughes.

(Via a Facebook discussion that I linked to yesterday here.)

Why should we succumb to what Virginia Postrel calls the "seduction" and "glamour" of travel?

As you may remember, I'm skeptical about travel. Travel is promoted by the industries that profit from it, including writers who romanticize it, and I question whether the consumers who hemorrhage money and submit to the ordeals of travel even know their own minds as they profess to love travel.

Now, Virginia Postrel has this essay titled "The Glamour of Getting Away/No matter how unpleasant the real journeys, travel still has a way of seducing us," and I don't see why her observations don't lead her to the same skepticism that I have. She tells us about the advertising and photography that lure us into thinking travel will be sublime, and that in reality travel rewards our effort and expense with far less pleasure than we formed our expectations around.

But instead of seriously questioning travel, Postrel only shifts to self-help mode with a few sentences of advice on how to make the best of travel:

If you expect your vacation to be a series of perfectly composed still photos, with no sandy bathing suits, sore feet, or fellow tourists, you won’t have a good time. But you can... adopt a viewpoint that downplays the difficulties of your journey and highlights its pleasures. Expect the plane delays and enjoy the view. Focus on the beauty of Venice and ignore the stink. Create happy memory snapshots as you go, preserving the glamour of travel.

In other words, the hope for pleasure and fulfillment that makes you want to spend and work on travel comes from an illusion, but if you do additional work, work on preserving the illusion, you can still get some pleasure and fulfillment. There's no discussion of the alternative of resisting the sales pressure and not buying. Is there a better way to spend your money and your time? One could cast aside illusions and search for the truth, including the truth of what genuinely gives pleasure.

Postrel has made "glamour" her subject, so perhaps she would say we get pleasure from illusions, and truth itself is overpromoted and insufficiently pleasurable.

Why did the President say "art history"?

We were talking about this yesterday, and here's Virginia Postrel — via Instapundit — talking about the factual inaccuracy of pointing to art history, in particular, as a college major that might not correlate with a good income:

[A]rt history isn’t a major naive kids fall into because they’ve heard a college degree — any college degree — will get you a good job... [I]t’s famously elitist.... It’s stereotypically a field for prep school graduates, especially women, with plenty of family wealth to fall back on. In fact, a New York Times analysis of Census data shows that art history majors are wildly overrepresented among those in the top 1 percent of incomes. Perhaps the causality runs from art history to high incomes, but I doubt it.

That is, it's not that studying art history leads to a high-paying job, but that people who are already in a very affluent social class choose this major and then do very well exploiting pathways that exist for them because of pre-existing wealth. 

Why "You Didn’t Build That" won't go away: Obama "went after bourgeois dignity."

Virginia Postrel explains:

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations....

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient.... McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.”...

Read the whole Postrel piece, and perhaps the book as well. (I just put it in my Kindle.)

A question for the day: What is each candidate inviting us to sneer at?

Solve the birth control controversy by selling the pill over the counter.

Says Nick Gillespie, quoting Virginia Postrel. That's the libertarian analysis. But isn't there some need for a doctor's exam? Obviously, the doctors must think so, and they have so much to gain if Obamacare covers everything. Meanwhile, Instapundit notes that his "wife’s heart attack was probably caused by birth-control pills." You can say the doctor's visits she had didn't prevent that, but would there be even more heart attacks and other calamities if women could just grab these items off the shelf? I have no idea, but then I never liked the idea of taking pills for birth control. Pills change the structure of your body, including your brain, do they not? You become a different person. Not that I thought I was such a wonderful person — back in the pre-self-esteem days — but I wanted to know that whatever I was was really me and not a drug.

From "her inwardness is violated" to: she "is like a raped interiority."

Virginia Postrel, noting the "needlessly ugly and opaque the prose" of academics, quotes Francine du Plessix Gray's review of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex":

Writing about the aggressive nature of man’s penetration of woman, [earlier translator] Parshley felicitously translates a Beauvoir phrase as “her inwardness is violated.” In contrast, [new translators] Borde and Malovany- Chevallier’s rendering states that woman “is like a raped interiority.” And where Parshley has Beauvoir saying of woman, “It is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life,” the new translators substitute, “It is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.” In yet another example, man’s approach to woman’s “dangerous magic” is seen this way in Parshley: “He sets her up as the essential, it is he who poses her as such and thus he really acts as the essential in this voluntary alienation.” But in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, “it is he who posits her, and he who realizes himself thereby as the essential in this alienation he grants.” Throughout, there are truly inexcusable passages in which the translators even lack a proper sense of English syntax: “Moments women consider revelations are those where they discover they are in harmony with a reality based on peace with one’s self.”

You may wonder who will read writing like that, but the book will be assigned in courses... that you'd probably be wise not to take. So the good news is: repellent writing is a good thing. Like evil-tasting poison.

"As always with Obama, it's a question of who the rubes really are. It's the power of glamour."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, quoting me — and possibly implying that I'm one of the rubes. On "glamour," he links to this, from Virginia Postrel. Postrel makes a distinction between "charisma" —"a personal quality that inspires followers to embrace the charismatic leader's agenda" – and "glamour" — which "encourages the audience to project its own yearnings onto the glamorous figure."

When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they've backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.

But then why haven't Obama's supporters gotten mad?

I have to think psychological phenomena are far more complex. It can't be that there really is a substance "charisma" and a substance "glamour" that one can possess and that have specific, different effects on other people.

And does it really help to use those terms — with their weird roots in religion and witchcraft?

It might be better to think about the difference between a leader and a figurehead. (Obama's potential as a figurehead is much more apparent than his potential as a leader.) But I think you can get angry and disillusioned at either.

What does any of this have to do with who ought to be considered a "rube"?

I think Glenn is alluding to Obama's shot at those people in "small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest" who "get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The idea seems to be that what really makes you a rube is not where you live but whether your politics spring from unexamined emotions.

If that's what his gnomish concision is about, let me say that I didn't vote for Obama in the primary because I projected a dopey enthusiasm onto a glamorous blank screen. Forced to choose between Clinton and Obama, I voted for Obama — even though he stated positions that were farther from what I want than Clinton's — because I thought he had more mental flexibility and pragmatism, that he was more likely absorb and process evidence and advice and exercise sound judgment.

ADDED: Glenn, being less gnomishly concise, explicitly strikes my name from the list of possible rubes.

When divas attack, Part 2.

Virginia Postrel seems to approve of her colleague's attack on me. It's just a short post. I can't tell how she feels about government being so bold as to ban racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants. She seems to think it was amusingly ridiculous of me to object to ideologues who took umbrage at such laws.

ADDED: I'm just remembering that I tangled with Postrel over this before Bailey wrote his post. I suspect that lit a fire under Bailey somehow. Maybe it was this line: "What is shocking is to encounter walking relics who are in love with the ideas that were used back in the 1960s to fight off the Civil Rights movement... and who aren't ashamed to declare their love publicly."

When divas attack.

Virginia Postrel -- who's competing with me in a diva contest -- paraphrases something I wrote like this:

Grande Conservative Blogress Diva frontrunner Ann Althouse attends a Liberty Fund conference and decides libertarian and conservative intellectuals are scarily like the 9/11 hijackers. (My response to her specifics is in the comments.) It does seem rather divalike...

What did I actually say?

I am struck ... by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas. I'm used to the way lefties and liberals take themselves seriously and how deeply they believe. Me, I find true believers strange and -- if they have power -- frightening. And my first reaction is to doubt that they really do truly believe.

One of the reasons 9/11 had such a big impact on me is that it was such a profound demonstration of the fact that these people are serious. They really believe.

Is the Postrel paraphrase apt? It does omit the fact that I made a closer comparison between libertarians and conservatives on the one hand and lefties and liberals on the other. And, in context -- what terse context there is -- you can see that I'm talking about the ideologues and hardcore fundamentalists of either stripe.

I mean to say -- and it's there to be seen if you are a sympathetic reader -- that I instinctively think of my fellow human beings as sensible and practical. We have some ideas and principles but we also watch how things play out in the real world and are prepared to modify what with think and correct our course when things aren't going well. People who embrace an idea with a death grip scare me, and they should scare you too. Look at history. Look what happens when people believe so deeply they lose sight of where their ideas are taking them and go along with their ideas even if they require other people to suffer and die. I don't trust the true believers and ideologues. I find them strange when they don't seem to feel the pull of common sense and human empathy. I don't want them to have power. They can sit around thinking and talking or praying and brooding, but I don't want to see what they would do with the world. That said, obviously, most people who are attracted to religion or politics of the left and the right are ordinary practical, sensible people. I still think that. It will still surprise me to encounter anyone in a death embrace with an idea.

Let's look at what Virginia said in the comments:

I don't know who was at this conference, and I've never read Frank Meyer, but I have been to dozens of Liberty Fund conferences and, more often than not, found them to be genuine conversations where disagreements are invited. The point is the conversation, and no one is invited to a conference in order to be "persuaded" or tested for ideological purity. (Lately, Liberty Fund has, however, been interested in including bloggers.)

That was true here, and I never said otherwise. But no one was invited to represent the liberal or left positions, and things were set up to create a sense that we were honoring Meyer.

But, and this may be why Ann is so uncomfortable, assumptions that go without questioning in some contexts--like Madison, Wisc.--do not necessarily enjoy such lack of scrutiny around a Liberty Fund table.

Well, that completely misunderstands what I wrote! I said that people at the table shared assumptions that would have been instantly challenged in my usual place of Madison, Wisconsin, and that I continually felt I needed to voice positions that were quite obvious and needed to be said and that would have been ignored if I hadn't taken on something of the role of resident liberal. By the way, if they had wanted to persuade me or proselytize, it would have been a horrible mistake to leave that vacuum, which I got sucked into. That left me feeling far more antagonistic than I would otherwise have been.

On the specific issue of civil rights, in my experience libertarians then and now have been divided about the question of public accommodation (as opposed to desegregation of government facilities like schools). Some, including myself, are acutely aware of the need to break the racial caste system that had been enforced through a combination of legal strictures and legally tolerated terrorism in the South. We are therefore willing to make the tradeoff in sacrificing freedom of association.

And, in that case, I won't classify you with the fundamentalists and ideologues who scare me. But you concede that you've got some libertarian friends who -- even today -- in the name of property rights, would have allowed private businesses to continue to discriminate based on race for as long as they felt like it. I was amazed to encounter people who not only thought that and admitted it, but insisted on fighting about it with idealistic fervor.

But, unlike our blog hostess, we explicitly recognize that such a tradeoff exists.

I don't know where that comes from. Explicitly recognize? Maybe that only means that I didn't write out a sentence in my post saying that I am capable of seeing something. So what? Obviously, I know that if you tell a restaurant owner he can't exclude black people that diminishes his autonomy and personal freedom. Telling people they can't rape and murder also limits individual choice, but I don't have to explicitly recognize that every time I write about it.

Others, most notably Richard Epstein among contemporaries, think that tradeoff has had too many negative consequences, including tangled arguments about whether private employers should be allowed to implement affirmative action. (He thinks they should be allowed to.)

As for the argument about whether economic pressures would or could have ended Jim Crow, it's hard to know how such a counterfactual would have worked out in practice; certainly there is some evidence, e.g., from the steel industry in Birmingham, that "foreign" (i.e., northern) firms resisted segregation. It's hard to picture a South full of segregated McDonald's, but one never knows. Certainly outsiders who wanted to integrate their customer bases or workforces were freer to do so than locals, who were subject to financial pressures (local banks could be nasty enforcers) and, in many cases, physical threats.

It can indeed be shocking to encounter such arguments for the first time, but that doesn't mean those arguments aren't worth thinking about, if only to understand why, other than knee-jerk "this is what everybody I know thinks" reasons, you believe they are wrong. The quality of the discussion at a Liberty Fund conference depends largely on exactly who the 16 people are and whether they are willing and able to enter into the spirit of the discussion.

I'm not encountering these arguments for the first time. I teach about them every year when we do Heart of Atlanta and Katzenbach v. McClung in Con Law. What is shocking is to encounter walking relics who are in love with the ideas that were used back in the 1960s to fight off the Civil Rights movement... and who aren't ashamed to declare their love publicly.

I'm not referring to everyone at the conference, it should be noted. Generally, people were smart, articulate, and decent. The conference was extremely well-run, interesting, and valuable. I don't want my following up on this point to cause anyone to think otherwise.

(To vote in the diva contest, go here. You can vote once a day.)

The blue finger of democracy.

My colleague Gordon Smith writes:

I love the ink-stained index finger as a symbol of democracy. If I were George Bush, I would hold up an ink-stained finger in the State of the Union address this week.

It was only a few days ago that there was talk that the ink-stained finger would be a dangerous identification, that would mark people for retaliation, that people would need to hide it. Now we see the pictures of people actively displaying what was devised as a utilitarian safeguard, turning it into a proud new symbol of the love of democracy.

UPDATE: Thanks to Virginia Postrel for linking to this post. She subtly reminds me that the ink is more purple, not so much blue. Maybe it's the same ink used in those old mimeograph machines (the fragrant ink us kids in the 60s used to inhale with delight). An emailer wonders how the lack of an ink-stained finger is regarded today in Iraq.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

"Maybe it's the same ink used in those old mimeograph machines (the fragrant ink us kids in the 60s used to inhale with delight). "

A positively Proustian figure. However, allow me to offer a clarification. That ink wasn't from Mimeograph [sic; it's their trademarked name] machines. In fact it was from Ditto machines -- an entirely different copy process.

Mimeographs used what amounted to a stencil on a drum, through which ink (almost always black) was pressed onto the paper. Ditto used masters typed with a special "carbon" paper which actually deposited aniline dye upon a master sheet, in the shape of each letter. This master was then pressed against blank sheets that had been dampened with a special solvent.

The small amount of the dye that transferred to the solvent-dampened sheets left the imprint of each letter that was on the master.

This dye was almost always purple, although a rather wretched red was also available.

The solvent was a chemical something like benzene or xylene, I believe: a ring-shaped molecule that chemists in fact call an "aromatic". The slow effluorescence of this solvent produced that odor you remember so vividly.

The advantage of the Ditto process was that it was far less messy than Mimeograph, which demanded the frequent handling of viscous black ink that had to be poured into the machine's drum. Hugely messy. Not so with Ditto. Still, if you were careless enough to touch the dye-letters themselves on the master, you'd come away with a purple finger. Which brings us delightfully back to those Iraqi fingers, doesn't it?

Two things and a thing about two.

A day or two ago, two different emails advised me that something that I wrote reminded them of "The Substance of Style," the Virginia Postrel book that just came out in paperback, so I decided I ought to buy the book. As longtime readers know, I can't stand to buy just one thing. If I have one thing to buy, I become a prowling beast of a consumer, in search of a second thing to buy. The nearest book that appealed to me, in the Sociology section at Borders, was Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which either is or is not related to the themes in "The Substance of Style," though I'm sure if my life depended on it I could come up with a theory about why they are about the same thing. Postman's book dates back to 1985 and so, as it predicts the future, I presume it completely fails to account for our absorption into cyberspace, but I'm interested in Chapter 10 – "Teaching as an Amusing Activity" – and as I said, I needed a second book in order to be able to buy the first book.

And speaking of two, this is my second post of the day offering up raw material for anyone who would like to work on the theory Althouse is a bit insane about numbers.