Welcome to TP Ideas‘ weekly roundup of the best conservative writing! Every Friday, we take a look at three pieces by right-leaning writers that constructively articulate core elements of their worldview. The goal isn’t to find conservatives telling us how right liberals are, but rather to pick out writing that helps liberals understand where their ideological foes are coming from.
So let’s get started.
1. “Lena Dunham & Jill Duggar: Baring It All for Us” — S.D. Kelly, Christ & Pop Culture
Lena Dunham has been in the news this week. Probably the best response to Dunham’s new book and the political kerfluffle surrounding it was penned by S.D. Kelly in Christ and Pop Culture. Conservatives have criticized Dunham for not knowing when to stop telling us about her personal life, and Kelly certainly picks up on that theme: “In the contemporary account of growing up, self-revelation becomes not only entertainment, but a stand-in for Thoreau’s idea of the examined life.”
But Kelly also adds a cross-ideological twist by arguing that the cultural mirror image of Dunham can be found in Jill Duggar — one of the daughters in the extremely conservative and extremely numerous Duggar family — featured in The Learning Channel’s “19 Kids and Counting.” And as it happens, Duggar has also written a tell-all book stumping for her family’s conservative approach to sex, dating, and all the same topic Dunham covers:
We take Lena Dunham and Jill Duggar seriously as arbiters of how to live because so many of us, religious, secular, conservative and progressive alike, have sacrificed the medium for the message. As long as one of the many, many people cluttering pop culture in the digital age says something we agree with, we don’t care how she says it. And while we watch from our respective corners, cheering or jeering as the case may be, each woman sacrifices her sense of self and the freedom to grow up in private on the altars of ideology and politics and commerce.
Having been repeatedly accused of offering too much information about herself, Lena Dunham objects to the phrase in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross. “Too much information has always been my least favorite phrase because what exactly constitutes too much information?”
I’d like to take a crack at answering Lena’s question. What, exactly, constitutes too much information? Too much information becomes too much information when it is the sum total of information, when a person is nothing more than a collection of situations, sensations, dictates, status updates and aphorisms — all of it regurgitated before even being digested. We watch as Jill Duggar and Lena Dunham, their book deals and Twitter followers predicated on continual self-revelation, are reduced to the sum total of their parts. As they give parts away, episode by episode, one candid appearance on the Today show and illuminating interview on NPR at a time, what exactly will it all add up to in the end? Accept yourself, they each say, but they don’t finish the thought: and hope there is a self left when nobody is watching.
Political scientist Andre Gelman has pointed out that social and cultural issues motivate the voting habits of richer Americans most strongly, while economic and pocketbook issues motivate poorer voters. (The phenomenon of the working class “voting against its interests” because politicians have swayed them with social issues is actually quite limited.) Perhaps the most dispiriting part of Kelly’s essay is the observation that Dunham and Duggar may well represent the future of how this slugfest between rival cultural tribes will play out among the upper class, as they turn to their media consumption to reveal “the key to the good life.”
“This is the new frontier of the culture wars,” Kelly observes. “The progressive-conservative clash resounding in personal experiences of twenty-somethings, each blow landing with a dull thud.”
2. “In Defense of Daring: The Virgin Galactic Accident and Next Steps for Private Space” — Rand Simberg, The New Atlantis
Last week, a spacecraft run by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic — a private firm working its way into space-tourism — tragically broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another. This prompted Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine to take Branson to task — along with other billionaire owners of private space forms — for “too much hubris, too much hucksterism and too little knowledge of the head-crackingly complex business of engineering.”
This week, Rand Simberg, a libertarian author and entrepreneur himself, came to Branson’s defense in The New Atlantis. Simberg’s description of Branson as “a visionary and a philanthropist” who could “change the world” is a bit overcooked, but he makes an enthusiastic case that Branson’s personality traits, both good and bad, are a necessary part of the mix that will drive human space exploration. Furthermore, he does it by digging into the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the very institution Kluger would prefer handled our quest for space in lieu of Branson and his fellow billionaires:
It might be instructive here for Kluger to consider the life story of another individual — someone who in the early 1930s was a pilot for the Marine Corps, and then re-enlisted during World War II. This man was primarily a lawyer and a businessman, becoming a vice president at a firm that built instruments for airplanes. In the early 1960s, this man somehow “insinuated” himself “into the space business” even though he was a “non-professional” on space matters (to use the same language that Kluger assigned to Branson). Yet somehow this individual, James E. Webb, the second NASA administrator, pulled together the new government agency that Kluger so admires and that, less than eight years after he took the reins, sent men from earth around the moon, winning the space race.
Kluger thinks that a Virgin Galactic crash “always seemed troublingly likely.” Well, it was certainly possible. In my recent book Safe Is Not an Option, I describe the various ways that SpaceShipTwo (among other privately operated space vehicles) could have a very bad day. But of course it is much more possible, and even “likely,” for such an event to occur in a test program — that is why test programs exist, and that is what they were for even in the early days of space, and before that in the early days of aviation. Test programs risk test pilots’ lives and risk vehicles in order to reduce and minimize the eventual loss of fully operational vehicles carrying passengers. Kluger, like some other commentators in the wake of last week’s news, seems not to understand the difference.
One argument here might be that, as a nonprofit and government-run project, NASA’s institutional culture is more inclined towards care and throughtfulness, while private firms might be more reckless under the comparatively “dynamic” pressures of profits and the market. On the other hand, Simberg credibly argues that a Branson-esque spirit of risk-taking and entrepreneurism was probably at work within NASA’s culture during the heyday of its greatest accomplishments.
Regardless, private space exploration seems to be the main game in town these days, barring a massive decision by the federal government to start actually spending money again. “One suspects that [Richard Branson] will be humbler in his hucksterism going forward,” Simberg wrote. “But go forward he probably will.”
3. “Sex and the Single Girl: A Review of ‘How to Build a Girl’” — Gracy Olmstead, Acculturated
Caitlin Moran’s novel How To Build A Girl hit shelves two months ago. It concerns a young woman named Johanna Morgan who deals with the insecurities of the teenage years by inventing an alter ego named Dolly Wilde, who writes scathing music reviews for a culture magazine while working her way through a plethora of booze, cigarettes and wild sex.
This week, Gracy Olmstead, who writes regularly for The American Conservative, reviewed the book in the pages of Acculturated. Olmstead found the characterization of Johanna — her needs and interior life — compelling and moving. But she also explores how human beings create themselves, a question that sometimes breaks down philosophically along conservative and liberal lines.
Roughly speaking, liberals view it as a post-modern process of of inventing ourselves in accordance with our own subjective sense of meaning, while conservatives view it as a matter of acknowledging that human nature is largely “given,” to flourish we have to identify and embrace the pieces of ourselves that already exist as they are. “What do you do when you build yourself,” Moran asks, “only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things?” Her answer comes down on the liberal view: “You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teenage years.”
This concept of personhood is rather interesting. Moran seems to believe that, in order to become a full “person,” we must be invented: that the raw materials that made up “Johanna” were not quite enough. She had to become Dolly Wilde — or, at least, Dolly Wilde was a rough draft of a better Johanna/Dolly who will emerge further down the road. We wonder throughout the book whether Moran is advocating for the natural innocence of Johanna, or for the powerful, self-created energy of Dolly — and I rather think that, in the end, Moran is advocating for neither: she is advocating for Johanna’s choice, to be whoever she wants to be.
But when we turn “choice” into a virtue, we remove a person’s ability to determine whether certain choices are right or wrong, wise or foolish. Johanna’s choice to become a writer is a good, inspiring choice. Her decision to find her own artistic style and flair is good. But Moran herself points out that these decisions have consequences. By the end of the book, we see that Johanna’s independence has not been without its costs (don’t want to spoil everything, but it does have repercussions on her family’s wellbeing). And this says nothing of the other choices Johanna makes, regarding sexual relationships and other wild lifestyle choices. Mightn’t they have consequences down the road? They seem to do some damage to Johanna’s usual chipper and delightful tone of writing, by the end of the book.
Olmstead, by contrast, argues that the answer to the question of who we are “lies less in self-recreation, and more in self-cultivation: in taking the raw material, and using it to grow and build a future, rather than in creating an artificial shell, and pouring ourselves into it.” Which is interesting, because it implies that raw materials can be trusted. Usually, it’s liberals who are assumed to view the world in a fundamentally optimistic way, and to see human beings as intrinsically decent (just corrupted by evil systems of power). Meanwhile, it’s conservatives who supposedly see the world as fallen and human beings as inherently sinful. In a way, Olmstead’s argument relies upon an implicit inversion of that script.
Update:
This piece has been edited for clarity.