If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.

Unless I'm reading him wrong, Roger Kimball seems to be taking the above very seriously -- to the point where he posits it in a philosophical dichotomy against Immanual Kant on the other side:

Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck's counsel when, in an essay called "What is Enlightenment?," he offered as its motto the imperative "Sapere Aude": "Dare to know!" Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being--a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who "gives the law to himself." As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.

Bismarck's observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy--"We must not let in daylight upon magic"--has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend "Here be monsters" that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe.

Enlightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to "get to the bottom" of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things "tick," to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?

Much as I like to get to the bottom of things, I'm not sure I can answer that question, because I don't think the two are necessarily in opposition. What goes into sausage is gross, as is what goes into legislation. You might not want to know, but does that mean there shouldn't be truth in labeling? Was Bismarck seriously arguing against inquiry, or was he merely offering an ironic warning that if you look too closely into things, you might not like what you find? Might Kant have even agreed?

On a more personal level, what are the implications vis-a-vis Plato's advice that an unexamined life is not worth living?

Kimball's essay is long, and contains much deserved criticism of what he rightly calls "criticismism" -- chiefly grounded as it is in mindless Post Modernist nihilism and deconstructionism. But many of today's Post-Modernist "critical thinkers" have most likely not read Kant, much less are they steeped in him. So I don't think it's quite fair to blame Kant or the Enlightenment for Post Modernist nihilism -- any more than it's fair to blame Darwin for Auschwitz. Nor are Freud and Nietzsche responsible for what others did with their ideas. Nor is John Stuart Mill to be blamed for the fact that some people experiment with drugs:

It seems obvious that criticismism is a descendant or re-enactment of the Enlightenment imperative "Dare to Know!" In this sense, it is a precursor or adjunct of that "hermeneutics of suspicion" that the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur invoked when discussing the intellectual and moral demolition carried out by thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It would be hard to exaggerate the corrosive nature of these assaults. Often, indeed, what we encounter is less a hermeneutics of suspicion than a hermeneutics of contempt. The contempt expresses itself partly in a repudiation of the customary, the conventional, the habitual, partly in the cult of innovation and originality. Think, for example, of John Stuart Mill's famous plea on behalf of moral, social, and intellectual "experiments in living." Part of what makes that phrase so obnoxious is Mill's effort to dignify his project of moral revolution with the prestige of science--as if, for example, his creepy relationship with the married Harriet Taylor was somehow equivalent to Michael Faraday's experiments with electro-magnetisim. You see the same thing at work today when young hedonists in search of oblivion explain that they are "experimenting" with drugs.

Of course, this is starting to sound serious, and regular readers know how I abhor being serious about anything! Why, I've spent five years writing this silly blog, and whatever serious thoughts I've expressed I've tried to carefully stuff within sausage casings of satire, irony and humor.

Best of all, anything I write will quickly expire. No sooner do I hit "publish" and "save" than it starts to get stale. And after the passage of little more than a week, it disappears from public view, lying forever in silly and ironic archives. Which means that even if an occasional serious thought slips through, few will notice.

Anyway, over the years I've been a fan of a number "hedonists in search of oblivion," and no, I won't bore readers with another Grateful Dead video, because I realize not everyone likes the Dead as much as I do. But earlier I found a YouTube video of a wonderful old song by the Troggs -- "Love Is All Around" -- which took ten minutes to write in 1967! (Damn, that makes me jealous; it took me more than a half an hour to write this blog post.....)

Enjoy.

It's probably not a good idea to watch hedonism being made, though.

It can get boring.

MORE: Speaking of laws and sausages, I'm thinking that Bismarck's analogy might be outdated by today's standards. That's because while sausage manufacturers might still know what goes into their products, as this post by Arthur Silber reminded me, today's legislators often have no idea what they're putting into theirs:

With regard to FISA and issues of liberty and privacy in general, let me now ask you a few questions. How long do you think it would take you to identify, read, and understand every provision in every statute, regulation and other authorization that gives surveillance powers to the government? Furthermore: Would you know each and every place to look, or how to determine what those places were? Additionally: With a staff of 20, or 50, could it be done, even if you were provided with limitless time and limitless funds?

I submit to you, without qualification or reservation, that you could not do it. No one could. Consider that most legislators in Washington aren't even aware of much of what's in the bills they so eagerly vote on. Consider the prohibitive length and complexity of legislation that comes before Congress. That's true of what is going on now. If you tried to track down every piece of legislation, every regulation, every administrative agency ruling, and every other pronouncement still in effect that allows the government to surveil and otherwise keep track of you, me, the guy down the street, the woman next door and the man in the moon, based on alleged concern with and the need to protect us all from the ravages of drugs, "illicit" sex, any and all other suspected criminal activity and, natch, terrorism, how on God's green earth would you do it? You couldn't.....

Worst of all, they're not even disclosing the language of the legislation they're passing without reading:

What's a little odd is the lack of public discussion about this new fingerprint database. No mention of it appears in the official summary of the revised Senate bill. No fingerprint database requirement is in the House version of the legislation approved earlier this month. No copy of the revised Senate legislation is posted on the Library of Congress' Thomas Web site, which would be the usual procedure.

I have to say, I never thought I'd advocate bringing back the quaint old days of yesteryear when laws were made like sausages, but I think truth in labeling is called for. Manufacturers who won't say and don't know what they're putting into their products should be sued and put out of business instead of hiding behind official immunity.

In theory, there is accountability because law makers still have to be elected. But when they close ranks and pass these things in a bipartisan manner, what need is there to worry about elections?

MORE: A commenter directed my attention to this newer version of "Love Is All Around" by Wet Wet Wet. It's very nice, and as the commenter (Sheryl) observed,

...The whole performance stabs me in that place you get stabbed by music that touches joy. Gah! Hard to talk about it without sounding like an idiot....