Uncertain Principles

This is going to be a bit of a free-associative ramble, for which I will insincerely apologize in advance (after all, if I was really sorry about it, I just wouldn't post it in the first place...).

Wandering through the "blogosphere" the past few days, I've seen a lot of discussion of Randy Barnett's Glenn Reynolds impersonation, and his claim that "the Left really and truly lives in a socially constructed world." This disingenuous nonsense has been taken down in lots of places, most notably by Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, who points out that Barnett's co-conspirator Eugene Volokh rightly takes offense at a similar line of argument from the Left. As Kieran puts it, writing to Volokh, "You should send Randy an email with a link to your blog or something -- he'd really benefit from reading it."

(To digress for a moment, The Volokh Conspiracy is one of those "blogosphere" phenomena (doo doo de-doo-doo), like Samizdata.net, that I Just Don't Get. Lots of people seem to think highly of it, but whenever I drop by, I'm underwhelmed. Now, granted, I don't read it regularly, so maybe I'm missing something, but the pieces I've seen linked approvingly by right-wingers generally leave me unimpressed, while the stuff I see linked by left-wingers, like Barnett's piece and Tyler Cowen's foolishness about do-not-call lists (again, nicely dismantled on Crooked Timber) strike me as the rankest idiocy.

(I realize that part of the attraction is that the actual Volokhs (Eugene, at least) are important and well-known in Real Life (TM). But even restricting things to Eugene's posts, I've never been blown away by what he writes. He always seems to engage in the same sort of "pick your desired conclusion, and then argue to get to it" reasoning that bugs me about much of political webloggery. Maybe people are just impressed that he writes like an actual law professor, which is relatively rare in blogdom...)

(And that snarky remark conjures unbidden the image of Glenn Reynolds filing court papers consisting entirely of snippets from various Posner and Scalia decisions, separated by single lines of "original" content, like "Indeed," or "Read the whole thing," with the occasional liberal jurist quoted, followed by a "Why do they hate America?" But we're getting way off track now...)

Anyway, my reaction to Barnett's "argument" resonated nicely with Ginger Stampley's post on ideology and character. Like Ginger, I've more or less stopped reading the bloggers who most annoy me, even though that risks some degree of ideological isolation. In the end, though, it's just not worth dealing with people of low character (a nice description Ginger quotes from Rafe Colburn)-- the question-begging, straw-man bashing, and McCarthyite smearing of political opponents on the sites in question irritate me well past useful levels. Barnett's post strikes me as another example of a person setting out to argue that his opponents are not only mistaken, but Bad People, and character doesn't get much lower than that.

Which is pretty much where things sat until this morning, when I read Jim Henley announcing a new blog and highlighting a post regarding A.S. Byatt's comments on Harry Potter. I've mentioned this before (and there's another Crooked Timber citation...), and you can find the whole Byatt article quoted here if you want to avoid the New York Times paywall.

Anyway, my reaction to Barnett is pretty much the standard complaint about Byatt. She's not just saying that the books aren't particularly good, the argument goes, she's claiming that the readers and fans of the books are Bad People. And thus, we hates her forever! Or something.

This came to mind because that wasn't how I read the Byatt article at all. I actually thought she made some good points regarding the books-- the Freud stuff was overdone, but she puts her finger on something that's bugged me about the books for a while, when she notes that "Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous." Now, granted, she goes on to follow that observation up with some tendentious remarks about cartoons and soap operas, but that struck me as just the sort of thing you need to do to "sex up" an essay to get it in the New York Times, and get people talking about it. I read it as more of an attempt to be "provocative" than an ad hominem attack on Harry Potter readers, and was mildly surprised to see the vehemence with which it was attacked.

I wrote the difference in reactions off as an inside/outside fandom thing. The strongest anti-Byatt responses I saw were via Kate's LiveJournal friends list, and those are mostly people who are part of Harry Potter fandom, while I'm, well, not. I read the books, and I enjoy them in a "I want to see what happens next" sense, but I just don't find them all that captivating. The world strikes me as relentlessly non-numinous (to cop Byatt's term), and has an ad hoc sort of feel that prevents me from getting too involved, while the characters fail to be all that memorable for me. (Which means, incidentally, that critiques of Byatt like the one at Polytropos, based on really liking the books, leave me unmoved.) Militant Potter fandom is another thing that I Just Don't Get.

I do, however, recall what it's like to be part of a fan community and see it attacked from outside. And I remember being grievously offended by "attacks" that were, in retrospect, fairly mild, and generally well-founded. So I can understand how people who hold the books dear might take the Byatt article much more personally than I do, and react accordingly.

Which got me to wondering whether my reaction to the Barnett piece might not be similar. After all, my impression was mostly due to the snippets posted at various liberal weblogs, and the discussion therein. Maybe I'm just a part of "liberal fandom," as it were, and took his piece too personally as a result.

So I went back and re-read it, keeping the fandom problem in mind.

Nope. It's still one of the most idiotic and insulting things I've read since... Well, in quite some time. What's more, his follow-up piece, billed by some as a partial retraction of the original, is equally stupid.

But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?

Posted at 11:23 AM | link | follow-ups |