Daylilies and the Spectre of Idealism

Every plant has its problems. For example, daylily blossoms only last for a single day. We've got a couple of clumps of Mary Todds in our front yard that are well established and currently at their peak. The blooms are staggered, which is nice, but the deer love to nip off not only the blossoms but also the buds. That's a second problem.

This year I put some green plastic fencing around one clump, and Hilary suggested we put some old netting that had been idling in the garage for decades around the other. This has preserved the blossoms ... but blooming daylilies don't look all that hot when seen through such fabrics. This morning I removed the netting from the clump under the piano window. The flowers look great! Will I remember to replace the net in position tonight. Who knows?

Wandering out back, I loaded some decaying leaves from the compost pile into a galvanized bucket and spread them around on the floor of our "cherry orchard," where I recently planted a turtlehead and Hilary transplanted some groundcover. That might sound like a grandiose name— "cherry orchard"— for a strip of land where, a few years ago,  I discovered two volunteer cheery trees amid the underbrush. But what better place to be grandiose, and playful, and a little imaginative, than in one's own back yard?  

I was enjoying the morning, unalloyed by the nagging thought that I wasn't doing anything productive, because I'd already done a few things. I sent a file to a client in Massachusetts to be proofed. I'd looked up some royalty figures for Norton. I emptied the dishwasher. I uploaded some files to SpeedPro to be made into posters.

One of them was for a rock band called Seth that will be playing at the Hopkins High School 50th reunion in a few weeks. My brother-in-law, David, was in that band, back in the mid-seventies. Will we "crash" the reunion just to see David up on stage? It's hard to say.

Settling down to a recent issue of the New Yorker, I spotted an essay by Adam Gopnick about the historian Charles Taylor. I was reminded of one of Taylor's earlier books, A secular Age, that I bought decades ago. I didn't think much of it at the time—it seems to be arguing for a utopian return to medieval guilds and  faith communities. To judge from Gopnik's critique, the new volume, which carries the vaguely portentous title Cosmic Connections, is cut from the same cloth.

Yet when I fetched my copy of A Secular Age from the basement. and opened it, my eyes immediately came to rest on a passage brilliantly exposing the poverty of materialist explanations of history, while underscoring the role played not only by concepts in general, but by ideals specifically, in historical development.

"In general, a new practice will have both “material” and “ideal” conditions; which of them we try to explain may depend on which is problematic. Why did a democratic revolution occur just then, and not before? The answer may be: because people hadn’t suffered from monarchical rule as much as they came to on the eve of the turn-over; or it may be because they began to see from some striking example that democracy brings prosperity (the draw of Europe?). But it might also because at that moment they had developed the repertory which allowed for a self sustaining democracy, as against just a revolt which changed one mode of despotism for another. And it may also be because democratic forms of rule came to seem right, and in keeping with their dignity, around that time. There is no good empirically-based reason to think that the second kind of explanation must always give way to the first. The weighting between the two can’t be determined a priori, but will be different from case to case."

But there is really no need to choose between the two. Material and conceptual (or spiritual, if you will) elements are at work at every moment of our lives.

At this point Taylor feels the need to explain in some detail what the interaction between ideas and conditions looks like, by considering the question of "how the new idea of moral order came to acquire the strength which eventually allows it to shape the social imaginaries of modernity." Good question.

He begins by mentioning the "discursive practices" of thinkers reacting to the devastations of the Wars of Religion, who felt the need to identify a basis of legitimacy unsullied by religious differences. Reaching further back in time, he draws our attention to the "domestication of the feudal nobility" between the 14th and 16th cen­turies.

"I mean the transformation of the noble class from semi-independent warrior chieftains, often with extensive followings, who in theory owed allegiance to the King, but in practice were quite capable of using their coercive power for all sorts of ends unsanctioned by royal power, to a nobility of servants of the Crown/nation, who might often serve in a military capacity, but were no longer capable of acting independently in this capacity."

All of this makes perfect sense to me. In fact, it's a fine description of the dialectical process itself, though that specific word, "dialectic," doesn't appear in it. Taylor clearly wants to stick close to events, hoping to avoid even a whiff of Hegelian meta-history or teleology.

A Secular Age is 800 pages long, and I'm suddenly convinced I'll have to get back to it soon.

But maybe not right now.