What I Saw in America

2014-01-29T12:12:00.001-05:00

This site remains available as an archive of my informal writings between 2007-2013. For those interested in current commentary, I now post a regular weekly column at The American Conservative. Additional writings have appeared at Front Porch Republic.

Who Closed the American Mind?

2013-02-01T07:52:00.002-05:00

This retrospective review, written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's unexpected bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, appeared in the October 2012 issue of "The American Conservative." As it's now been liberated from its paywall, I'm posting it here as well.

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One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus of the University of Chicago, where I had just enrolled as a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the renowned Committee on Social Thought. While I had not yet met him, I had heard much about Allan Bloom, a legendary professor, teacher, and lecturer. I had read his translation of Plato’s Republic as an undergraduate and had some notion that I would write my eventual dissertation under his direction.

As I crossed one of the campus quads, I saw a man sitting on a bench, swaddled under a heavy overcoat and his head topped by a fedora. A photographer was arranging his equipment across from him, while he bemusedly awaited some kind of publicity shoot. While I realized only a short time later that the man I had seen was Allan Bloom, it was a year later—a quarter-century ago—that I realized that I had witnessed the photo session that led to the headshot inside the hardcover jacket of Bloom’s blockbuster book The Closing of the American Mind. By that time, I had left the University of Chicago, disillusioned by the program and put off by Bloom’s circle of students. But I loved the book and credit it, at least in part, for my eventual return to the academy and a career as a professor of political philosophy.

I still assign the book with some regularity, especially in a freshman seminar on education that I’ve taught over the last half-decade. As the years have passed, I’ve noticed how the book has aged—many of its cultural references are long dated, while contemporary hot-button issues like gay marriage and religious liberty are altogether absent from Bloom’s confident pronouncements on our likely future. Still, the book continues to excite new readers—today’s students find it engaging, even if, unlike their elders, they don’t get especially upset by it and almost unanimously have never heard of it before. And with every re-reading I invariably find something new that I hadn’t noticed before, a testimony to the expansiveness of Bloom’s fertile mind.

While I continue to learn much from Bloom, over the years I have arrived at three main judgments about the book’s relevance, its prescience, and its failings. First, Bloom was right to be concerned about the specter of relativism—though perhaps even he didn’t realize how bad it would get, particularly when one considers the reaction to his book compared to its likely reception were it published today. Second, his alarm over the threat of “multiculturalism” was misplaced and constituted a bad misreading of thezeitgeist, in which he mistook the left’s tactical use of identity politics for the rise of a new kind of communalist and even traditionalist tribalism. And, lastly, most of his readers—even today—remain incorrect in considering him to be a representative of “conservatism,” a label that he eschewed and a worldview he rejected. Indeed, Bloom’s argument was one of the early articulations of “neoconservatism”—a puzzling locution used to describe a position that is, in fact, today more correctly captured by its critics on the left as “neo-liberalism.”

What should most astonish any reader of Bloom’s Closing after 25 years is the fact that this erudite treatise about the crisis of higher education not only sat atop the bestseller list for many weeks but was at the center of an intense, lengthy, and ferocious debate during the late 1980s over education, youth, culture, and politics. In many ways, it became the most visible and weightiest salvo in what came to be known as “the culture wars,” and people of a certain generation still hold strong opinions about Bloom and his remarkable, unlikely bestseller.

Today there are many books about the crisis of higher education—while the nature of the crisis may change, higher education never seems to be out of the woods—but none before or since Bloom’s book achieved its prominence or made its author as rich and famous as a rock star. It was a book that many people bought but few read, at least not beyond a few titillating passages condemning rock-and-roll and feminism. Yet it was a book about which almost everyone with some engagement in higher education held an opinion—indeed, it was obligatory to have considered views on Bloom’s book, whether one had read it or not.

Bloom’s book was at the center of a debate—one that had been percolating well before its publication in 1987—over the nature and content of a university education. That debate intensified with the growing numbers of “diverse” populations seeking recognition on college campuses—concomitant with the rise of departments of Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, and a host of other “Studies” studies—leading to demands that the curriculum increasingly reflect contributions by non-male, non-white, non-European and even non-dead authors.

The Closing of the American Mind spawned hundreds, perhaps even thousands of responses—most of them critiques—including an article entitled “The Philosopher Despot” in Harper’s by political theorist Benjamin Barber, and the inevitably titled The Opening of the American Mind by Lawrence Levine. Partly spurred by the firestorm initiated by Bloom’s book, perennial presidential candidate Jesse Jackson led a march through the campus of Stanford University shouting through a bullhorn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Passions for campus reform ran high, and an avalanche of words, articles, denunciations, and ad hominem attacks greeted Bloom’s defense of the Western canon.

Yet the nuances of Bloom’s qualified defense of the Western canon were rarely appreciated by critics or supporters alike. While Bloom was often lumped together with E.D. Hirsch—whose Cultural Literacy was published the same year and rose to number two on the New York Times bestseller list, just behind Closing—Bloom’s argument was fundamentally different and far more philosophically challenging than Hirsch’s more mundane, if nevertheless accurate, point that educated people increasingly did not have knowledge about their own culture. Hirsch’s book spoke to anxiety about the loss of a shared literary and cultural inheritance, which today has been largely supplanted by references to a few popular television shows and sports televised on ESPN.

Bloom made an altogether different argument: American youth were increasingly raised to believe that nothing was True, that every belief was merely the expression of an opinion or preference. Americans were raised to be “cultural relativists,” with a default attitude of non-judgmentalism. Not only all other traditions but even one’s own (whatever that might be) were simply views that happened to be held by some people and could not be judged inferior or superior to any other. He bemoaned particularly the decline of household and community religious upbringing in which the worldviews of children were shaped by a comprehensive vision of the good and the true. In one arresting passage, he waxed nostalgic for the days when people cared: “It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholic and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously…”

He lamented the decline of such true belief not because he personally held any religious or cultural tradition to be true—while Bloom was raised as a Jew, he was at least a skeptic, if not a committed atheist—but because he believed that such inherited belief was the source from which a deeper and more profound philosophic longing arose. It wasn’t “cultural literacy” he wanted, but rather the possibility of that liberating excitement among college-age youth that can come from realizing that one’s own inherited tradition might not be true. From that harrowing of belief can come the ultimate philosophic quest—the effort to replace mere prejudice with the quest for knowledge of the True.

Near the beginning of Closing, Bloom relates one telling story of a debate with a psychology professor during his time teaching at Cornell. Bloom’s adversary claimed, “it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students.” Bloom compared that function to the activity of an older sibling who informs the kids that there is no Santa Claus—disillusionment and disappointment. Rather than inspiring students to replace “prejudice” with a curiosity for Truth, the mere shattering of illusion would simply leave students “passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself.”

Bloom relates that “I found myself responding to the professor of psychology that I personally tried to teach my students prejudices, since nowadays—with the general success of his method—they had learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything … One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.” Bloom’s preferred original title—before being overruled by Simon and Schuster—was Souls Without Longing. He was above all concerned that students, in being deprived of the experience of living in their own version of Plato’s cave, would never know or experience the opportunity of philosophic ascent.

This core of Bloom’s analysis seems to be not only correct, but, if possible, he may have underestimated its extent. Consider the intense response to Bloom’s book as evidence against his thesis. The overwhelming response by academia and the intelligentsia to his work suggested anything but “indifference” among many who might describe themselves as cultural relativists. Extraordinary debates took place over what books and authors should and should not appear in the “canon,” and extensive efforts were undertaken to shape new curricula in light of new demands of “multiculturalism.” The opponents of Bloom’s book evinced a deep concern for the formation of students, if their concern for what and whom they read was any indication.

In retrospect, however, we can discern that opponents to Bloom’s book were not the first generation of “souls without longing,” but the last generation raised within households, traditions, and communities of the sort that Bloom described, and the last who were educated in the older belief that a curriculum guided the course of a human life. The ferocity of their reaction to Bloom was not simply born of a defense of “multiculturalism” (though they thought that to be the case) but a belief that only a curriculum of the right authors and books properly shapes the lives of their students. Even in their disagreement with Bloom, they shared a key premise: the books we ask our students to read will shape their souls.

Today we live in a different age, one that so worried Bloom—an age of indifference. Institutions of higher learning have almost completely abandoned even a residual belief that there are some books and authors that an educated person should encounter. A rousing defense of a curriculum in which female, African-American, Latino, and other authors should be represented has given way to a nearly thoroughgoing indifference to the content of our students’ curricula. Academia is committed to teaching “critical thinking” and willing to allow nearly any avenue in the training of that amorphous activity, but eschews any belief that the content of what is taught will or ought to influence how a person lives.

Thus, not only is academia indifferent to whether our students become virtuous human beings (to use a word seldom to be found on today’s campuses), but it holds itself to be unconnected to their vices—thus there remains no self-examination over higher education’s role in producing the kinds of graduates who helped turn Wall Street into a high-stakes casino and our nation’s budget into a giant credit card. Today, in the name of choice, non-judgmentalism, and toleration, institutions prefer to offer the greatest possible expanse of options, in the implicit belief that every 18- to 22-year-old can responsibly fashion his or her own character unaided.

Bloom was so correct about the predictable rise of a society defined by indifference that one is entitled to conclude that were Closing published today, it would barely cause a ripple. This is not because most of academia would be inclined to agree with his arguments any more than they did in 1987. Rather, it is simply the case that hardly anyone in academe any longer thinks that curricula are worth fighting over. Jesse Jackson once thought it at least important to oppose Western Civilization in the name of an alternative; today, it would be thought untoward and unworkable to propose anyshared curriculum.

Those who run institutions of higher learning tell themselves that this is because they respect the choices of their young adult charges; however, their silence is born precisely of the indifference predicted by Bloom. Today’s academic leaders don’t believe the content of those choices has any fundamental influence on the souls of our students, most likely because it would be unfashionable to believe that they have souls. As long as everyone is tolerant of everyone else’s choices, no one can get hurt. What is today called “tolerance,” Bloom rightly understood to be more deeply a form of indifference, the extreme absence of care, leading to a society composed not only of “souls without longing” but humans treated as utilitarian bodies that are increasingly incapable of love.

If this core argument of Bloom’s seems prescient, a second major argument not only seems to me incorrect but in fact is contradicted by this first argument. It was because of his criticisms about the rise of “multiculturalism” that Bloom came to be readily identified with the right-leaning culture-warriors like William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza and was so vilified on the academic left. Yet Bloom’s first argument implicitly makes a qualified praise of “multiculturalism,” at least as the necessary launching pad for the philosophic quest. In his praise of the belief structures that once inspired some students to disillusionment, he was singing the praises of a society composed of various cultural traditions that exercised a strong influence over the beliefs and worldviews of that culture’s youth.

Such qualified praise led him to wax nostalgic about an age when Catholics and Protestants cared enough to hate one another. But at his most alarmist—and, frankly, either least perceptive or most pandering—Bloom portrays then-regnant calls for “multiculturalism” as a betrayal of the norms of liberal democracy and as the introduction of dangerous tribalism into the university, as well as the body politic. At times, Bloom painted a portrait in which the once-ascendant claims of American individual rights, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, were about to be displaced by the incipient warfare of identity tribalism and groupthink.

At his best, Bloom sees through the sham of yesterday’s “multiculturalism” and today’s push for “diversity”—little of which had to do with enthusiasm for real cultural diversity, but which was then and remains today a way for individuals in under-represented groups to advance entitlement programs within America’s elite institutions. Those individuals, while claiming special benefits that should accrue to members in a particular group, had no great devotion to any particular “culture” outside the broader American anti-culture of liberalism itself. Indeed, the “cultures” in question were never really cultures at all, if by a culture we mean an identifiable group of people who share a generational, geographical, and distinctive set of customs aimed at shaping the worldview and practices of successive generations.

By this measure, women, blacks, Hispanics, and so on were people who might once have belonged to a variety of particular cultures, albeit not specifically as women or blacks or Hispanics. These new categorical groupings came to be based on claims of victimhood rather than any actual shared culture; many cultures have been persecuted, but it does not follow that everyone who has been mistreated constitutes a culture. While in passing Bloom acknowledged the paucity of such claims to cultural status, too often he was willing to take seriously professions of “multiculturalism” and to lament the decline of the American project of universalist natural rights.

The stronger case would have been to expose the claims of multiculturalism as cynical expressions from members of groups that did not, in fact, share a culture, while showing that such self-righteous claims, more often than not, were merely a thin veneer masking a lust for status, wealth and power. If the past quarter century has revealed anything, it has consistently shown that those who initially participated in calls for multiculturalism have turned out to be among the voices most hostile to actual cultures, particularly ones seeking to maintain coherent religious and moral traditions.

Bloom was prone to obtuseness about this fact because, at base, Bloom himself was not an admirer or supporter of the multiplicity of cultures. Indeed, he was suspicious and even hostile to the claims of culture upon the shaping of human character and belief—including religious belief. He was not a conservative in the Burkean sense; that is, someone apt to respect the inheritances of tradition and custom as a repository of past wisdom and experience. Rather, he was at his core a liberal: someone who believes that the only benefit of our cultural formation was that it constituted a “cave” from which ambitious and rebellious youth could be encouraged to pursue a life of philosophy.

Reflection about Bloom’s distaste for particular cultures suggests that the differences between Bloom and his apparent nemesis, the Cornell professor of psychology, are rather minimal. Both wanted to disabuse the youth of their “prejudices” in the name of openness: the psychology professor in the name of nihilisitic openness, and Bloom for the encouragement of philosophical inquiry, open to the possibility of Truth as well as the possibility of nihilism.

In fact, Bloom’s critique of the “multicultural” left is identical to and drawn from the critique of the “multicultural” right advanced by his teacher, Leo Strauss. In his seminal work Natural Right and History, Strauss identified Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution as one of the lamentable responses to the “Crisis of Modern Natural Right,” a crisis that arose as a reaction against the social contractarianism of “modern natural right.” Burke’s argument against the revolutionary impulses of social contractarianism constituted a form of conservative “historicism”—that is, in Strauss’s view, the rejection of claims of natural right in favor of a preference for the vagaries of History. While today’s Straussians concentrate their criticisms largely on left historicism (i.e., progressivism), Strauss was just as willing to focus his criticisms on right historicism, that is, the traditionalism of Burke and his progeny.

Ironically, because the left in the 1980s adopted the language (if not the substance) of multiculturalism, Bloom was able to turn those Straussian critiques of Burke against those on the left—though of course they were no Burkeans, even if they used some Burkean language. For this reason, Bloom was assumed by almost everyone to be a “conservative,” a label that he not only explicitly rejected, but a worldview that he philosophically and personally abhorred.

Bloom’s argument became a major touchstone in the development of “neoconservatism,” a label that became associated with many fellow students of Strauss but which, ironically, explicitly rested on rejection of the claims of culture, tradition, and custom—the main impulses of Burkean conservatism. Bloom continuously invoked the natural-rights teachings of the Declaration and Constitution as necessary correctives to the purported dangers of left multiculturalism: rather than endorsing the supposed inheritance of various cultures, he commended the universalistic claims of liberal democracy, which ought to trump any identification with particular culture and creed. The citizen who emerged from the State of Nature, shorn of any specific cultural, religious, or ancestral limitation, was the political analogue for the philosopher who emerged from the Cave. Not everyone could become a philosopher, Bloom insisted, but everyone could be a liberal citizen, and ought rightly to be liberated from the limitations of place and culture—if for no other reason, to make them more tolerant of the radical philosophers in their midst.

Bloom’s was thus not only an early salvo in the culture wars, but an incipient articulation of the neoconservative impulse toward universalistic expansion. Burke’s willingness to acknowledge the basic legitimacy of most cultures—his “multiculturalism”—led him, in the main, to oppose most forms of imperialism. The rejection of multiculturalism, and the valorization of a monolithic liberal project, has inclined historically to a tendency toward expansionism and even imperialism, and neoconservatism is only the latest iteration of this tendency. While many of the claims about Strauss’s influence on the Iraq invasion and the neoconservative insistence upon spreading democracy throughout the world were confused, there was in fact a direct lineage from Bloom’s arguments against the multicultural left and rise of the neo-liberal or neoconservative imperialistic impulse. Bloom explicitly rejected the cautiousness and prudence endorsed by conservatism as a hindrance to philosophy, and thus rejected it as a political matter as a hindrance to the possibility of perfectibility:

Conservatives want young people to know that this tawdry old world cannot respond to their demands for perfection. … But … man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. …. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are.

Bloom here witheringly rejected “realism” as “the easy way out” of real inquiry; yet, in the wake of the Iraq invasion, one of Bloom’s longstanding allies and admirers, John Agresto, lamented the overconfidence of the neoconservatives, and especially their neglect of the reality of culture, in a post-invasion book entitled Mugged by Reality.

Bloom’s book remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it was, ultimately, more reckless than many of its readers realized at the time—not because it was conservative, but precisely because it rejected the conservative impulses to modesty, prudence, the genius of place, and tradition. It opened an era of “culture wars” in which the only combatant who seemed absent from the field was a true conservatism. Perhaps it is finally time for an opening of the American mind.

Quigley on Georgetown, 1967

2012-05-22T11:57:00.000-05:00

The Hebrews and the Greeks, who are our cultural parents, and our own western civilization descended from these two, have always agreed that the only sin, or at least the greatest sin, is pride, a particularly aggressive type of self-deception. And anyone who is concerned with the health of individuals knows well that neuroses and psychoses are basically simply forms of self-deception, combined with an obstinate refusal to face the facts of the situation.

This kind of illness is prevalent in all American higher education and in all the sub-divisions of it, existing, indeed, in a more obsessive and virulent form in the aspirant "Great Universities" than in the so-called "Great Universities" themselves. It is to be found in its acute form in Catholic education, in Jesuit education, and at Georgetown.

Of course, that is not what we are being told. Today, in education, as in government and in everything else, the propagandists flood us daily with rosy reports on how well things are going. Larger and larger expenditures of manpower, money and facilities (such as floor-space) are devoted to telling the world about the wonderful job being done in every organization worthy of the name from the Johnson Administration down (or up) to Georgetown University. Fewer and fewer people are convinced, or even listening, but in the process the money and facilities (if not the manpower) which could have been used on the goals of the organization are wasted on propaganda about what a wonderful job is being done, when any sensible person with half an eye can see that, every year, a poorer job is being done in the midst of self-deceptive clouds of expensive propaganda.

But beneath these clouds, ominous cracklings can be heard, even at Georgetown. If they come from within the University, they are drowned out with another flood of words, denials, excited pointings to a more hopeful, if remote, future, or by the creation of some new organizational gimmick, a committee or a new "Assistant Something-or-Other," to deal with the problem.

If, on the other hand, these criticisms come from outside the University, they are ignored or attributed to jealousy, sour grapes, or to some other unflattering personal motivation of the critic. When these criticisms come, as they often do, from some departing member of the faculty, they are greeted by reflections on his personal competence or emotional stability, both of which had been highly esteemed as long as he remained here. As a result, most departing faculty, to avoid such personal denigration, depart quietly, but they depart. Their reasons for leaving are then attributed to the higher pay to be obtained elsewhere, an explanation which fits in well with the Big Lie at GU, that all its problems would be solved if the University only had more money. Anyone who knows anything about the situation knows perfectly well three things: that Georgetown's problems would not be solved by more money and have not been, but, on the contrary, have grown steadily worse as the supply of money has increased; that resigning faculty have been leaving because they were discontented; and that the chief cause of that discontent has not been inadequate pay, but the generally chaotic and misguided Administration of the University....

Professor Carroll Quigley
"Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?"
The Hoya
April 28, 1967

Seven Years

2012-03-29T06:44:00.006-05:00

Seven years ago today, my teacher and friend, Wilson Carey McWilliams, passed away. I miss his gentle wisdom and bear hugs; his gravelly voice and uproarious stories; his invitations to sip bourbon as the sun descends toward ground.

We need his voice more than ever. Here is an excerpt from an essay entitled "Religion, Morality, and Public Life," re-published in the recent collection of Carey's essays The Democratic Soul. The essay was written in 1999, but still rings as true today as when it was written over a decade ago.

.....

In contemporary practice, the moral picture is not entirely bleak. Despite much uneasiness and more posturing, there have been gains in the relations between the races and the genders, and many old abuses are now subject to sanction. And religion, if it needs saying, provides support for the decencies and for some sense of obligation. But the temple, if standing, is in need of repair, especially since so many of the institutional pillars of the Framers' moral design have been unsettled or pulled down.

That states and local governments are now held to the essentially secular standards of national law would inspire some sympathy among the Framers, although the Supreme Court's insistence on the "wall of separation"—rendered almost go labyrinthine by the Court's opinions--goes far beyond the understanding and practice of the founding generation.

It is a matter for greater concern that the institutions of civil society have been so thoroughly penetrated and reshaped—and often shattered—by economics, technology, and the "hidden curriculum" of the media. In the new order of things, indignity is commonplace: the media confront us with superstars, just as the market disproportionately rewards elites; by comparison, the intermediate dignities offered by local communities seem tawdry. This perception is strengthened by the fact that localities--and with them, a good many personal relationships--increasingly are exposed to mobility and change, transient connections to which we are apt to limit our liability.

Despite general prosperity, economics adds desperations, weakening our already slender resources of trust and moral community. Inequality is escalating, with the middle class recently losing ground to both rich and poor. The vogue of "outsourcing" and "downsizing" makes jobs feel insecure, even in good times. Responding in kind, Kristin Downey Grimsley reports, employees are becoming less loyal to the firm or to their fellows, resulting in a workplace that may be "leaner," but is surely "meaner."

It is hardly surprising, consequently, that so many Americans are hesitant or half-hearted about commitments, or that they seek solace in immediate or short-term gratifications, inclinations evident even in the seats of power. It is also understandable that we are tempted to treat market forces as if they were autonomous and irresistible, partly because doing so saves us from the burden of responsibility, allowing us a more or less guiltless pursuit of interests and enjoyments. But conceding sovereignty to the market leaves us only the consumer's passive freedom to make choices, rather than having a say in defining what is choice-worthy. All of these retreats from society, politics, and faith diminish us, so that more and more Americans seem to be looking, sometimes furiously and sometimes wistfully, for what is missing.

......

Recquiscat in pace, my friend.

In the National Cathedral

2012-03-13T03:17:00.002-05:00

On Sunday I was the invited speaker at the magnificent National Cathedral in a series devoted to the exploration of political themes. The subject was "The State of Political Language." The event was recorded, and is available here.

Our Libertarian Future

2012-02-17T14:41:00.002-05:00

I was invited by the good people at "Minding the Campus" to write a response to the recently released 2011 American Freshman Survey. My brief essay is now available on their website. My main point:

What the data also demonstrates is [not only an increase in libertarian toleration, but] a keen and intense emphasis on the self. Today's students simultaneously urge toleration toward others, but also expect to be left alone. Their overarching emphasis upon individual achievement--particularly in the area of career advancement--suggests that the message of "toleration" and "diversity" seamlessly co-exists with a self-centered focus on material success and personal lifestyle autonomy. At risk is a cultivated belief in civic membership, a sense of shared fate and even forms of self-sacrifice.

One telling aspect of the survey has, to my knowledge, received no attention: while 72.3% state that the "chief benefit of college is to increase one's earning power," only 2% of current college graduates are enrolled in an ROTC or other military program. While likely career choices are fragmented among many possible choices (with the largest numbers of responses clustering around the choices of engineer, physician and business, together totaling 28%), only 1.5% responded that they foresaw a military career; 0.9% intended to enter government or public policy; and .1% stated an intention to become a member of the clergy. As many respondents indicated a likely future of unemployment (1.5%) as those willing to serve in the military!

...

Several disquieting questions should come to mind: what kinds of citizens will these people grow up to be? What kinds of parents and what kinds of neighbors? They will likely be willing to leave other people alone--but will they care about others? Will they love? Will they serve? Will they sacrifice? According Charles Murray in his recent book Coming Apart, it is the upper classes (which will be composed by the students in this survey) that have largely abandoned any idea of trusteeship and moral and civic responsibility toward those who have not won the meritocratic sweepstakes. The survey suggests that this divide will only deepen in coming years.

I fear that we are not ushering in a utopia of toleration and sensitivity, but one of indifference and self-absorption. Today's young people have deeply absorbed the lessons that have been taught them by their elders. Do we truly think a civilization can persist when it teaches its young that the most important thing in life is indifference toward others and that the means to happiness is earning the most money?

Religious Liberty?

2012-02-16T09:14:00.000-05:00

Vast and even incalculable quantities of ink have already been spilled over the issue of the HHS mandate that religious organizations purchase contraception as part of their compliance with the Obama health care plan. It would seem that little remains to be said.

I have read and pondered this issue as it has unfolded. I have signed a document, with many other scholars, objecting to the recent "compromise" on the grounds that it does not resolve the basic issue of forcing a religious institution to provide a service that is incompatible with its doctrine and belief. I am largely in agreement that this issue represents a profound and disturbing encroachment upon the internal ordering of religious organizations.

However, I am disquieted by the way in which the issue has largely been framed - not only by the Left, but perhaps more by the Right. The Right has sought to defend "religious liberty" on the grounds that the HHS mandate would represent an abrogation of the First Amendment's right to "free exercise" and that it would violate the "conscience" of religious adherents. By these appeals to the "rights" of religious organizations to hold certain religious beliefs - whatever those may be - and by an appeal to "conscience" informing that belief - no matter what it may hold - critics of the HHS policy have framed their response in the dominant privatistic language of liberalism. Their defense rests on the inscrutability and sanctity of private religious belief. It borrows strongly from sources of private religious devotion that lays no claim to public witness, in keeping with liberalism's dominant mode of allowing acceptable religious practice so long as it remains outside the public square. The appeal to conscience, while lodged at the level of institutional belief, subjects itself easily to the same claim by adherents within that religious order who might similarly object to a religious mandate (e.g., the prohibition on artificial birth control) on grounds of "conscience" to aspects of that belief (think Martin Luther. Or Andrew Sullivan.). The public response of critics of the mandate essentially cede to liberalism most of the ground that they would need to mount a serious case against the individualizing, relativizing and subjective claims that lie at the heart of the mandate and, more broadly, liberalism itself.

More than a few commentators have noted that this issue seems particularly oriented toward and at the Catholic Church. While some wags have questioned why other religious traditions don't seem to have a problem with other aspects of the mandate (e.g., Christian Scientists haven't risen up in objection to coverage of blood transfusions), frank speech requires acknowledgement of a more fundamental truth: from its earliest articulation, liberalism has set its sights on the rout of Catholic Christendom. Liberalism was fundamentally animated by a deep philosophical and theological objection to Catholicism - and, until recent times, vice-versa. Debate over the HHS mandate should be understood in its broadest context: the longstanding effort to wholly remake society in the image and likeness of liberal philosophy. That philosophy holds at its core that humans are by nature free, autonomous and independent, bound only by positive law that seeks to regulate physical behavior that results in physical harm to others (and, increasingly, selves). Liberal people should not be bound by any limitation upon their natural freedom that does not cause harm (mainly physical harm) to another human; otherwise, the State should be indifferent ("neutral") to any claims regarding the nature of the "the Good." Liberalism seeks to secure legal structures governing "Right" - procedures ensuring fairness with an aim to protecting (and expanding) the sphere of individual liberty while balancing claims regarding the "harms" of some individual practices (e.g., liberalism seeks to limit some harmful activities of the market at the edges while leaving its basic structure intact).

Liberalism understood from the outset that it could not abide any religious tradition that sought to influence the order of society based upon its conception of "the Good." "Private" belief could be tolerated: such belief would extend only to the immediate adherents of that faith; its adherents had to personally choose their allegiance to that faith; and any faith commitment would be the result of voluntarist choice and thus, a chosen self-limitation on the part of the faithful. Famously in his "Letter Concerning Toleration," John Locke refused to extend toleration practically to only one faith - Catholicism. His claim was that toleration could not be extended to any faith that acknowledged a "foreign potentate," which, for all practical purposes, meant the Pope. But, it requires a peculiar set of assumptions to conclude that the Pope is a "foreign potentate" - while the Pope does not claim political rule over Catholics, the Pope is the final arbiter of doctrine that is to govern not only the private behavior of Catholics, but their role and witness in the world. It is no coincidence that many of the cases involving "religious liberty" now involve Catholics, inasmuch as Catholics have erected worldly institutions in the effort to live out the witness of their faith - schools, universities, hospitals, charities, and the like. The Catholic faith is, by definition, not "private"; it involves a conception of the human Good that in turn requires efforts to instantiate that understanding in the world. As such, Catholics represent a threat to the liberal order, which demands that people check their faith at the door and acknowledge only one sovereign in the realm of proscribing public behavior - the State.

Catholics begin with a fundamentally different understanding of the human person than liberalism. We are not by nature "free and independent"; we are, rather, members of the Body of Christ. In the natural law understanding, we are by nature "political and social animals" (so states Aquinas, following and amending Aristotle), requiring law, culture and religion for our flourishing and right ordering. The law does not simply seek to regulate and prevent bodies from committing harm; rather, the law necessarily derives from, and seeks to advance, a positive vision of human good and human flourishing. The law reinforces the Divine law, seeking the restraint not only of practices that will harm others, but which will tend toward a condition of sin and self-destruction. Even where the law is "silent," we are not at leave simply to act as we wish; rather, we are admonished to live in accordance with and by the practice of virtue necessary to human flourishing. A polity based upon securing "the Right" is radically insufficient; rather, the polity is understood to be a reinforcement of efforts to orient people toward "the Good." While the Church and State necessarily operate in different spheres, the State's activities are oriented by the vision "the Good" articulated by Church and God's word.

Critics of the HHS mandate have framed their responses to the mandate within liberal terms. This is doubtless a requirement and necessity in contemporary liberal society - to gain a hearing at the table of public opinion, and especially the Courts, arguments must be framed in dominantly liberal terms. Thus, critics of the Mandate have sought to craft their response by claiming that the Church's internal beliefs will be violated by the Mandate, that the Mandate represents an encroachment upon "conscience." Critics of the Mandate thus downplay and even ignore the content of the belief in question; they rally around the protections of conscience, claiming a sphere toward which the State should manifest indifference, in which they should not meddle. The nature of the belief is largely irrelevant for the sake of the claim. Many of the Mandate's critics (especially non-Catholics) claim that they regard the Church's view on birth-control to be somewhat batty, but that fact is irrelevant to the Constitutional issue protecting private institutional conscience and free-exercise. Catholic critics don't depart much, at all, from this same argument.*

Catholic as well as non-Catholic defenders have largely sought to hold at arms length any claims about the rightness or truth of the Church's teachings on birth control: these are to be treated as belief within a "black box" that should be ignored by liberal society. As long as those crazy beliefs don't harm individuals within or beyond the faith tradition, then they should be accorded respect and indifference by the State. The Church seeks the leave of the State on the only terms recognizable by the liberal state: we have a certain set of private beliefs that aren't harming anyone. Leave us alone, and we'll be quiet.

However, everyone is aware, even if dimly, of the real issue, though few explicitly raise the matter. The Church does not seek to propound its teachings as a matter of internal belief solely for its faith adherents: it claims that its teachings are true as a matter of human good. The teachings regarding birth control are not simply a peculiar faith tradition that is thought to apply to adherents of Catholicism; it is a teaching that Catholicism hopes and intends to be adopted by all people, regardless of their faith tradition. The strictures concerning birth control are not propounded as a "faith-based" peculiarity applicable only to Catholics, like Jewish dietary laws, but as a considered position concerning the Church's deepest understanding of the human good - one that can be, and has been, framed in terms that are intended to be accessible and persuasive to non-Catholics. Among other reasons offered, the adoption of a birth control concerns a practice that Catholicism has understood to entail profound social consequences that, when widely practiced, leads to profoundly damaging social practices.

The Church's argument - made at a time when it was believed by many that the Church had no choice but to update itself to be relevant to changing times - was articulated forcefully by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," and is addressed not only to Catholics, but to "all men of good will." As nicely summarized recently by Brendan Patrick Dougherty and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry, Humanae Vitae articulated four discrete areas of social and political concern that they believed would become manifest widespread use of birth control:

1. General lowering of moral standards

2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy

3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men

4. Government coercion in reproductive matters

The first three - unarguably evident in our time - concern the social implications of transforming sexuality from its intimate and natural link to reproduction to a "recreational," hedonic activity. The Church understood that the cumulative decisions of individuals - not intended to "harm" anyone - would nevertheless lead to manifest and extensive social ills. Liberalism begins and ends with the view that individual choice is paramount, and social costs can and should be redressed by government alone, leaving as much latitude possible to individual satisfaction of desire; Catholicism (echoing Aristotle) holds that society is an intricately woven fabric in which autonomous actions aimed at the satisfaction of individual desire will often prove destructive of that fabric. The Church holds this to be the case in all realms of human activitiy - sexual as well as economic, a point that is too often missed by American Catholics who allow their partisan identities to define their understanding of their faith (are those who oppose abortion and pornography any less "Social Justice Catholics"?). Liberalism holds that the State must be indifferent to the personal choices of individuals; Catholicism holds certain choices not only to be inherently wrong (even if they do not result in the immediate and evident harm of others), but, over time and cumulatively, socially destructive.

The last area of concern is perhaps even more difficult to grasp in an intuitive fashion than the first three. The last claims that the widespread adoption of birth control will eventually entail government coercion in support of its use. The Church understood - long before this tendency became evident - that liberalism was finally incapable of "indifference" toward the choices of individuals, particularly when those choices involved the limitation of individual autonomy, and particularly when any such limitation occurred in the context not of organizations that stressed individual choice, but rather asserted the preeminence of conceptions of the Good that commended practices of self-limitation. In short, liberalism would finally reveal its "partiality" toward autonomy by forcing institutions with an opposing worldview to conform to liberalism's assumptions. Liberalism would seek actively to "liberate" individuals from oppressive structures, even at the point of requiring such liberalism at the point of a legal mandate and even a gun.

The response of American Catholics to the HHS mandate has (perhaps necessarily) been framed in dominantly liberal terms that give it a chance of receiving a hearing in today's public sphere and within its Courts. But it should be acknowledged (as the response to the "Compromise" reveals) that the Church will ultimately lose the argument simply due to the fact that the way it is framed already represents a capitulation to liberal premises. Doubtless, an argument that stated more explicitly the Church's opposition to birth control would be even more quickly dismissed (but, first, caricatured and mocked) than the current invocation of "religious freedom." But, the real debate is not over religious freedom, in fact: it is over the very nature of humanity and the way in which we order our polities and societies. Catholicism is one of the few remaining voices of principle and depth that can articulate an forceful and learned alternative to today's dominant liberal worldview. That it truncates those arguments for the sake of prudential engagement in a contemporary skirmish should not shroud the nature of the deeper conflict. That conflict will continue apace, and Catholics do themselves no favors if they do not understand the true nature of the battle, and the fact that current arguments aid and abet their opponent.

___________________________

*See, for instance, an interview in today's Washington Post with William Thierfelder, President of Belmont Abbey College, in which he states "We’re not trying to tell anybody else how to live their lives. I, personally, I would hope people don’t seek abortions, but we’re not saying that. We’re being asked to violate our religious beliefs in our Catholic home." If this is the case, then my response is similar to Flannery O'Connor's retort to the fashionable notion that transubstantiation was only a metaphor: "What's the point?"

University, Community, Universe

2012-01-07T21:36:00.005-05:00

What follows are the remarks I delivered at the University of Notre Dame as a participant on a panel on "Education and Scale" at the annual conference of the Center for Ethics and Culture in November 2011.

The University as a Community within the Universe:
Getting the Relationship Right

Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University

This panel is entitled “Education in the Mass Age: Why Scale Matters.” If I know my compatriots well – given our shared work on a website called “Front Porch Republic,” whose motto reads “Place. Limits. Liberty.” – they will rightly argue that scale matters, and that in our age of globalization, expansion, homogenization, and consolidation, that we need to think small and insist upon the local. I want today to agree with them in part, but I want to suggest that we should be conscious of another and equally important argument in our age of secularized horizons: namely, that the gargantuanism and trends toward unification of the globe are finally too small, too narrowing, too “local.” I want to remind us today that we should be equally concerned not only with defending the local against the big, but to be wary of confusing the “big” with something bigger still, something truly universal, something not limited merely to the globe and to the human will and human action to fill that globe, but something that transcends what we today confuse as the “universal.” So, I want to suggest that a defense of the local needs to be linked with an argument in defense of the truly big, the truly comprehensive, the truly universal, that which goes beyond the saeculum in our narrow and constrained understanding of today.

Today we tend to pose the aims of smaller and arguably more local institutions – those we typically call “colleges,” particularly liberal arts colleges – against the aims of larger institutions called “universities,” by which we might typically mean “research universities.” The words we designate for the distinction between these two institutions reflect this difference of emphasis and self-understanding. The word college comes from “collegium,” meaning "community, society, guild," or literally an "association of collegae.” A college thus lays a stress upon the relationships between particular members of the community and seeks to foster an environment of learning in which the close bonds of its members is understood to be an integral part of the formation of students and the means by which faculty come to share a vision of their shared goal as educators. It is certainly this evocation of “college” that is stressed by the Patron Saint of the Front Porch Republic, Wendell Berry, in his arguments that colleges were originally formed in America as places that sought to educate the youth of particular communities in order to send them back into those communities where it was expected that they would contribute to the commonweal of those particular places.

The “university,” however – particularly today – emphasizes instead the relationship of its population to knowledge – and especially the scientific exploration and “creation” of new knowledge – and is organized around the principle of the division of labor and specialization. The members of today’s “university” – focused on the idea of attaining a knowledge of the universe – works toward this goal through specialized research that largely forestalls the creation of a community of scholars and students. Rather, the university, far from creating a “college,” in fact only can be seen to be adequately doing its work if most of its members work in extensive ignorance of the kinds of work being done by colleagues, often even those in the same departments.

The danger that is often highlighted by me and my colleagues on the Front Porch and elsewhere is that this model has become the norm, and that today every “college” is under pressure to remake itself in the image of the University, that every Ph.D. being trained today at Universities brings with him or herself the ideal of the contemporary fragmented university to institutions once designed to foster collegium. We see the acceptance of this norm in the trend today of renaming institutions once called “college” with the name of “university,” such as Bellarmine, Rider, Hollins, Beaver College (Arcadia University), even Globe College is now Globe University.

Against this trend there is a strong inclination to assert a defense of the college – the particular, the local, the community. This is right and meet, but it cedes too much of the ground of “universalism” to the contemporary University, which does not deserve this designation.

In fact, I want to suggest today that we accept too much of the narrative of a secularized conception of the university if we adopt the view that it is the collegium of the local that must be asserted against the globalizing claims of the university. For, when the local is shorn of recourse to a conception of the universal that it becomes susceptible to the attractions and claims of the false universalism, that “university” offered by today’s secular conception of knowledge.

I think this is largely the story of America’s colleges, in fact. That story has been well-told recently by thinkers such as Andrew Delbanco in a series of lectures at Princeton University entitled “Does College Really Matter? A History of Undergraduate Education,” and Anthony Kronman in his book Education’s End. Both describe the set of stages through which America’s institutions of higher education have gone, first from a wide variety of religiously-affiliated liberal arts colleges, then to a mix of land-grant and private universities that were increasingly disaffilitating, and today to a system that is dominated by the ideal of the research university and in which most institutions originally founded in a religious tradition have disaffiliated from their Churches. This particular story of disaffiliation – told well by James Burtchaell and George Marsden – should raise a discomfiting question, namely, what caused so many colleges – collegium - to become susceptible to the appeal of the call of the scientific claim to the “universal,” of a truth that could be thought to transcend the limited particularlity of the specific founding traditions of those colleges. While we tend to place the blame on the totalizing claims of the sciences, might we not raise the question whether the blame lies at least in part in the very particularity of the colleges – that is, the congregationalist foundings of many of the American liberal arts colleges that often stressed the truth of the particular community against the threat coming from forces outside those communities? Lacking a connection to, or animating vision of, a true universalism, thousands of colleges abandoned their religious affiliations, a dominant number within a century of their founding. This ought at least make us wonder not only at the power of the secular narrative, but the weakness of a particular theological understanding of “community.”

We might fruitfully compare these two American versions of the “college” – the particular – and the “university,” aiming at universality, with a different set of similar institutions ranging back in time, namely, the Monastery and the medieval University. The monastery placed similar stress upon the local and particular, with monasteries becoming an integral part of the particular places, and building deep relationships with the particular people, in their particular places. But the monasteries also understood themselves to be parts of a universal whole, related in their partiality to the universal Church and devoted to the worship of God. And further, even in the activities that were devoted to particular and seemingly limited ends – particularly the work of hands that might be thought to be deeply embedded in the particularities of local place and practice (“the mechanical arts”), monastic orders understood this work to be infused with a meaning that related it to the whole, to the true universal of God’s divine order. So it states in the Rule of St. Benedict that the monk will “regard all the utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar.” Even the most mundane tasks and tools were to be understood as part of a divine order, nothing particular shorn or divorced from a relationship to the whole of creation. The “college” was also a university.

Meanwhile, the medieval university was, as today, explicitly devoted to the exploration of the universe, but a universe not limited to that discoverable by the empirical sciences. And, like today, the university was comprised of people from every part of the known world, an association of foreign students gathered together to investigate the nature of the created order and man’s place in it. However, if today the university takes people from communities in order to make them into “citizens of the world” – or citizens of nowhere – in the Middle Ages, the universities attracted foreigners from around the world and formed themselves into what was called “nations” – sovereign entities apart from, and even in deep tension with, their particular cities. If today we might conclude that town-gown relations are sometimes rife with tension, it can barely be compared to the relations between the “nations” of universities and the Nation in which it happened to be located. One famous conflict occurred on St. Scholastica’s Day in 1354 between students and citizens at Oxford when students grew angry at the late night partying of the townspeople and a small conflict turned into pitched battle within the course of several days. On the second day of conflict, “the citizens, aided by some countrymen, defeated the scholars, and ravaged their halls, slaying and wounding. Night interrupted their operations, but on the following day, ‘with hideous noises and clamours they came and invaded the scholars’s houses … and those that resisted them and stood upon their defence they killed or in a grievous sort wounded….. The crowns of some chaplains, that is, all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy….” (Rait, 125-6). Now that’s a town-gown conflict…

The original meaning of the word “university” was not only invoked to indicate “universality,” but also meant, according to medieval jurists, “all kinds of community or corporation,” (Ridder Symoens, 37), in this case, “a guild in the world of learning …, a union of men living in studium and possessing some common interests to protect and advance” (Rait, 10-11). Thus, the university understood itself to be a particular organization of people – foreigners – who formed a community in the activity of investigating the universal. In order to achieve this, they had to organize themselves as a place distinct and apart from their particular places, as not to be embedded too much in the narrowing view of the city or “nation.” The “nations” of the university formed a community devoted to the universal. This idea of “university” has been replaced instead by a collection of foreigners who do not form a community in the pursuit of knowledge about the worldly, and hence become servants to the worldly and its limited and limiting ambitions.

In this very brief sketch, I think we can more valuably find in the examples of the monastic form of localism within the universal, and the medieval university’s self-understanding as a “nation” apart devoted to the exploration of the truly universal, two complementary understandings of the relationship between the particular and universal, the local and the transcendent, that point to the necessary relationship between the two, and a way of moving us beyond the false contemporary and secularized categories of “college” and “university." We can further see the false dichotomy that sometimes informs contemporary understandings between the "local" and the "universal," albeit as a way of highlighting the limitations of our contemporary conception of the "global."

Back

2012-01-07T21:25:00.002-05:00

Occasional or regular readers of these pages will have noticed that the site was down for the past month or so. Without further explanation, the site is back online, with a slick new re-design (feel free to weigh in - as a traditionalist, I am loath to change for the sake of change, but the old design seemed to me to have grown a bit static, and I thought a new year might be the occasion for a new birth of web design).

I will endeavor to post more regularly. Much to discuss. Happy new year to one and all.

PJD

Rousseau on Economics

2011-10-17T23:31:00.001-05:00

"If what you wish is merely to make a great splash, to be impressive and formidable, to influence other peoples of Europe, you have before you their example: get busy and imitate it. Cultivate the sciences, the arts, commerce, industry; have regular troops, fortified places, academies, and, above all, a fine financial system, which will make money circulate smoothly and so multiply and greatly enrich you. Strive to make money absolutely necessary so as to keep your people highly dependent - which calls also for fomenting material luxury and the luxury of the spirit that is inseparable from it. Do all this, and you will end up with a people as scheming, violent, greedy, ambitious, servile, and knavish as the next, and all of it at one extreme or other of misery and opulence, of license and slavery, with nothing in between....

"But if perchance you wish to be a free nation, a peaceful nation, a wise nation, a nation that fears nobody and needs nobody, a nation that is sufficient unto itself and happy, then you must use another method altogether, namely this: keep alive - or bring back to life - simple customs, wholesome tastes, and a spirit that is martial but not ambitious. Instill courage and unselfishness in the hearts of your people. Employ the masses of your population in agriculture and the arts necessary for life. Cause money to become an object of contempt and, if possible, useless besides...."

--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772)

Nine Eleven

2011-09-11T07:11:00.004-05:00

September 11, 2001, we are frequently told, is the day that "changed everything." For the 3,000 people in New York City and Washington D.C. who were killed on that blue-skied day, and for their families, that 9-11 "changed everything" barely suffices to describe what happened on that day. For the many more thousands of people in our military who have been deployed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for their families, their years of service have been very different than would have the case been before the attacks. For these people in particular - a fragment of our population - September 11th changed everything.

For the rest of us, very little has changed. Our national descent was likely accelerated by the events of that day, but that discernible course was not fundamentally altered. Our national ethic of consumption and distraction, while discomfited by the economic shocks experienced over the subsequent decade, remain our way of life. Our national reliance upon international militarism as our main discernible pose toward the world remains evident. Our recourse to the language of technique to confront deeper questions of moral crisis remains regnant. That a mere seven years after the attacks, the rot of our economic system came clearly into view - a system based upon a Ponzi scheme (yes, I said it), graft, debt and a "get-rich-quick" mentality that was universally shared, should at least give us pause about our character and our capacity for serious self-discernment.

After the first flush of horror and the desire to help, our long-term responses were two-fold. First, we were told by President Bush that we should "go shopping," and - finding it the easiest call to national "sacrifice" ever made - we followed his advice with abandon. We especially bought and sold property - countless sub-par piles of hastily constructed drywall structures unworthy of the first little pig - "paid for" by plentiful "cheap" money that we borrowed seemingly without limit. While 9/11 families continued to feel the anguished absence of loved ones whose lives were snuffed out inexplicably on a day they went to work or took a flight, and soldiers and their families prayed that they would not die on that day in the desert or the mountains far from home - we shopped. We spent - as families and as a nation - massive and finally uncountable amounts of money that was not ours. Many of our finest families became nominally rich on their "equity," turning their houses into piggy-banks which led to the purchase of more houses and a king's ransom in luxury goods.

A favorite television show in the years that followed the attacks on 9-11 became "Flip that House," joining other notable "reality" programming of the past decade that reflected the depth of our national seriousness and purpose after the attacks, such as "Jersey Shore" and "Keeping up with the Kardashians." During this week we have tuned in momentarily to recall the attacks and our hours of disbelief, and perhaps above all to be believe and hear voices intoning that we can feel deeply; but, tomorrow, we will return to our regular programming of empty carbs and circuses.

Second, we deployed. Every nation must defend itself, and a price doubtless had to be exacted from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If there was no shortage of money to borrow in the housing market, the attacks of 9-11 justified the unquestioned and unquestionable, and perhaps finally incalculable expenditure of national treasure in pursuit of a small terrorist sect who spent roughly $500K to bring down the towers. According to one estimate, the United States has spent $7,000,000 for every dollar spent by Al-Qaeda in response to the attacks - or, one-fifth of our current national debt. We will never know for certain how many people have gotten rich off of the "war on terror, but we at least have an inkling of the existence of a growing and largely unaccountable "top secret America."

In the meantime, we have refused to understand the attacks of 9-11, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - not to mention much that has preceded those events in America's growing involvement in the Middle East since the 1970s - as further expansion of, and evidence for, our age of resource wars over a diminishing pool of that most essential source of the industrial age - petroleum. It is not tantamount to the heresy of "blaming the victim" to note a fact that is rarely commented upon about the rise of Osama bin Laden, preferring as we do simply to understand him as an incomprehensible, mad, fanatic: he was one of a wave of "fundamentalists" whose main complaint was the presence of Western, and especially American, troops in "Mecca." That presence was the result of the invitation of the House of Saud dating back to the 1940s, when a cozy bedfellowship created by Saudi need for Western scientific prowess and Western need for Saudi oil fostered an unholy alliance that led most recently to an American president bowing to a desert sheikh. While bin Laden's response to this perceived incursion of the "infidel" into holy land was heinous and despicable, the truth is that we have been the main party in supporting a deeply pathological political and economic system throughout the Middle East, all in the name of securing "oil markets." Yet, we remain "shocked, shocked," that we are hated especially in this part of the globe.

It goes without saying that, for all of our "support for the troops," we will be willing to deploy them everywhere, anywhere, and for any length of time, as long as we can put cheap gas into our weed whackers.

The golden thread that runs through our response to 9-11 is how little has changed, especially considering our incapacity to subject our actions to probing and even discomfiting scrutiny. Above all, we are unwilling to question the obscenity of our blithe consumption, our foundational economic reliance upon usury, our addiction to irony and distraction, and our unswerving capacity to discount the effects of our current actions upon future generations.

9-11 was a lost moment to gain a clearer national self-understanding, but we have instead embraced a national ethic of self-deception. A decade later we are nearly in ruins. We have wrecked our economy through our failure to exercise prudent and responsible "household management" - the Greek roots of the word "economy." We have wrecked our political system through our failure to see clearly what even (or only?) Sarah Palin was willing to pronounce recently - that we have lost the Republic and have gained an oligarchy. We have wrecked our primary educational institutions in the name of "self-esteem" and "no child left behind"; we have dismantled our vaunted liberal arts inheritance once aimed at teaching limits, character, and virtue, for the utilitarian ambitions of "assessment," job-preparation and STEM. We have wrecked our moral ecology with our willingness to trade vibrant local cultures in which families and communities might flourish, for a global profit-making anti-culture of distraction based largely upon pornography and violence. We have wrecked our physical ecology for the inconvenience of not having to live within ten miles of a market and the convenience of not having to wash the dishes.

Much of the greatest damage in all these spheres of life has occurred in the decade since 9-11. So perhaps I'm wrong - everything has changed. But it has changed because we have not.

Community AND Liberty OR Individualism AND Statism

2011-07-29T18:17:00.000-05:00

(What follows is the text of the remarks that I delivered at the recently concluded I.S.I. Honors Program. The conference was entitled "The Language of Liberty").

Fells Point, Baltimore A narrative today dominates our political landscape that poses liberty as defined by classical liberalism against the collectivism of “progressive” liberalism or Statism.

One might reasonably conclude that, when it comes to “the Language of Liberty,” liberty seems – like Americans – to speak only one language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to one language, this narrative seems compelling enough as far as it goes. But it is, in the end, a severely limited “language,” even one that finally leads us to an incomplete and even mistaken set of conclusions about the relationship between individualism and collectivism. I’d like to see if we can’t expand our vocabulary a bit, and even suggest that a more appropriate name for this conference might be “the Languages of Liberties.”

By expanding our consideration to a different understanding of liberty, we change our position somewhat and see with more clarity that, what looks from our current position like a deep antipathy between individualism and Statism, is in point of fact something more of a continuity and logical progression. Without the addition of a distinct understanding of liberty to that of classical liberalism, from close up, all that we can discern are the opposite features of the two dominant political views of our day. By expanding our vista, however, we can better discern their relatedness, and propose that a true alternative is not between these siblings, but between a false choice of these two ideologies and a true choice between distinct and competing ideas of the very nature of liberty itself.

While there are a number of thinkers who can aid us in this expansion of our vocabulary, one thinker I wish today to highlight is one of the most penetrating and prescient of the mid-twentieth century conservative authors, the sociologist Robert Nisbet. I will have recourse to some of his powerful insights in his 1953 book The Quest for Community – recently re-issued by ISI Books – as well as his later 1975 book Twilight of Authority. Nisbet's key insight, variously articulated, was that Statism is a logical and even inevitable consequence of individualism – and thus, that the apparently opposite and conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and progressive liberalism are actually inseparable. If this is the case, to seek to combat iterations of collectivism by appeal to the individualistic principles of classical liberalism is to be engaged in the philosophical equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire.

At the heart of Nisbet’s analysis is the following claim – human beings are by nature social and relational creatures, and that modern liberalism begins with a set of assumptions that contradict that reality. In so doing, the assumption of anthropological individualism at the heart of liberalism, and the practical realization of individualism in the world, deforms the human person. It is this deformation – particularly the evisceration of a thick set of identities embedded in a variety of groups, whether family, community, polity, church, or any other of other institutions and organizations – that fosters the conditions that makes collectivism an attractive and even inevitable alternative. Without the rise of individualism, the rise of collectivism is inconceivable. To take recourse to an important image from an essay by Leo Strauss, the two philosophies represent major “waves” of modern thought – and, like waves, one forms from the material that preceded it onto the shore.

Before exploring this dynamic in more detail, let me first contrast two competing understandings of liberty, one largely developed in the ancient and Christian world, and the other centrally developed in the early-modern period by, among others, the philosopher John Locke. Both claim the “language of liberty,” but if one is true, the other is false, but, importantly too, it is only from the perspective of ancient liberty that one can see more clearly the close relationship between the individualism of classical liberalism and the collectivism of progressive liberalism.

Modern liberalism begins not – as might be believed if we were to follow the narrative of contemporary discourse – not in opposition to Statism or Progressivism, but rather in explicit and intense rejection of ancient political thought and especially its basic anthropological assumptions. Hobbes, among others, is frequently explicit in his criticisms of both Aristotle and “the Scholastics” – that Catholic philosophy particularly influenced by Aquinas, who was of course particularly influenced by Aristotle. Modern liberal theory thus began with an explicit rejection of Aristotelian/Thomist anthropology.

According to Aristotle, and later further developed by Thomas Aquinas, man is by nature a social and political animal – which is to say, that humans only become human in the context of polities and society. Shorn of such relations, the biological creature “human” was not actually a fully realized human – not able to achieve the telos of the human creature, a telos that required law and culture, cultivation and education, and hence, society and tradition. Thus, Aristotle was able to write (and Aquinas after him essentially repeated) that “the city is prior to the family and the individual” – not, of course, temporally, but in terms of the primacy of wholes to parts. To use a metaphor common to both the ancients and in the Biblical tradition, the body as a whole “precedes” in importance any of its constitutive parts: without the body, neither the hand, nor foot, nor any other part of the body is viable.

Within human societies, to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations, starting of course with the family. An essential component of our capacity to achieve human flourishing is our learned ability to place ourselves under rule and law. At first, as children, we are expected to obey because of the claims of authority – we follow rules and law because we are told to do so by our elders. As we grow in maturity and self-knowledge, we assume the responsibility of self-government – ideally in a form that is continuous between the individual and the city. For the ancients, liberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.
The various practices by which we exercise self-limitation and self-governance is comprehensively called virtue. By contrast, for the ancients, the inability or unwillingness to exercise virtue was tantamount to the absence of liberty. The unbridled or even extensive pursuit of appetite led necessarily to a condition of servitude and even slavery – slavery to one’s passions. Thus, for the ancients, law was not an unnatural imposition of humanity’s natural freedom; rather, law (ideally, a self-imposed law) was the necessary and enabling condition for liberty.

This idea of liberty is certainly not unknown in more recent times, though it is rarely articulated. One can find it, for instance, beautifully stated in the second verse of Katherine Lee Bates hymn "America the Beautiful":

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

The ancients emphasized the necessity of an appropriate scale in which such human flourishing could take place. First, the experience of law must necessarily be close, not distant, and must ideally be experienced as a form of self-governance. The more distant and impersonal the promulgation of law, the more it would necessarily be experienced as an external and even unnatural imposition upon me, and a divide would open between law and liberty (government “out there”). Additionally, the larger the scale, the law would fall generally and categorically upon a variety of circumstances, thus tending to inherent injustice as the natural variety and distinctivenss of human arrangements would be ignored or dismissed. Further, a large scale also lent itself to the anonymity and corresponding forms of irresponsibility (think of nature of anonymous commentary on many websites), while undermining the kinds of trust and responsibility that were required to foster a sense of gratitude and corresponding obligation between generations. Another consideration was that large scale political entities tended to aim at national or imperial greatness and wealth, and thus tended to stoke and tempt the appetites and undermine the inculcation of virtue. Ancient theory thus centrally considered the appropriate scale in which liberty as the practice of self-government through virtue could be realized. Liberty, so conceived, could only be realized in a small and local setting.

For the ancients, the highest aim of society was the flourishing of the free, self-governing individual and the achievement of our particular capacities – our talents and abilities – but such “individuality” could only achieved through the auspices of our political and social relationships. Thus, even as we might flourish in our particular gifts, we are simultaneously obligated to acknowledge that such gifts have their source in and through the contributions of our community. The achievement of our full humanity is necessarily appropriately accompanied by a disposition of gratitude, and a corresponding assumption of obligation to proffer the same prospects for future generations. Thus, while classical philosophy – especially Aristotelian and Thomistic iterations – extolled the condition of achieving the condition of a free individual, it was a philosophy that could be confused as aiming at “individualism.” The properly cultivated individual can never be conceived, much less experience, a wholly separate relationship to his community. It is incorrect to suppose that ancient thought denied a place for “liberty” or the aspiration to achieving distinct forms of individuality, but the context and definition of each differs considerably from contemporary understandings.

*** *** ***

Liberal theory fiercely attacked this fundamental assumptions about human nature. Hobbes and Locke alike – for all their differences – begin by conceiving humas by nature not as parts of wholes, but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even non-relational. There is no ontological reality accorded to groups of any kind – as Bertrand de Jounvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who had forgotten their childhoods.” Liberty is a condition in which there is a complete absence of government and law, and “all is right” – that is, everything that can be willed by an individual can be done. Even if this condition is posited to show its unbearableness or untenability, the definition of natural liberty posited in the “state of nature” becomes a regulative ideal – liberty is ideally the ability of the agent to do whatever he likes. In contrast to ancient theory, liberty is the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation upon our natural liberty.

For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social contract to secure our survival, but to make the exercise of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke – but especially Locke – understand that liberty in our pre-political condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals, but by the limitations that a recalcitrant and hostile nature imposes upon us. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy especially is actually to expand the prospects for our liberty – defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites – now through the auspices of the State. We come to accept the terms of the Social Contract because its ultimate effect will actually increase our personal liberty by expanding the capacity of human control over the natural world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints imposed by the natural world.

Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the State through the social contract, in a practical sense, the liberal State “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, now defined increasingly as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over nature. Far from their being an inherent conflict between the individual and the State, – as so much of modern political reporting would suggest – liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection between the liberal ideal of liberty that can only be realized through the auspices of a powerful State. The State does not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially commerce, the State establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the State of Nature – that is, the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous, freely-choosing individual. Rather than the State acting as an impediment to the realization of our individuality, the State becomes the main agent of our liberation from the limiting conditions in which humans have historically found themselves.

Thus, one of the main roles of the liberal State becomes the active liberation of individuals from any existing limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from limitations imposed by nature upon the achievement of our desires –one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent in that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which to realize not only existing desires, but even to create new ones that we did not yet know we had. One of its earliest functions is to support that basic role it assumes in extending the conquest of nature. The State becomes charged with extending and expanding the sphere of commerce, particularly enlarging the range of trade and production and mobility (e.g., Constitution positively charges Congress with “to promote the Progress of sciences and useful arts.” (“Progressivism” already in the Constitution). The expansion of markets and the attendant infrastructure necessary for that expansion is not, and cannot be, the result of “spontaneous order”; rather, an extensive and growing State structure is necessary to achieve that expansion, even at times to force recalcitrant or unwilling participants in that system into submission (see, for instance, J.S. Mill's recommendation in Considerations on Representative Government that the enslavement of "backward" peoples can be justified if they are forced to lead productive economic lives.).

One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is the liberation of otherwise embedded individuals from their traditional ties and relationships. The liberal State serves not only the “negative” (or reactive) function of umpire and protector of individual liberty; simultaneously it also takes on a “positive” (that is to say, active) role of “liberating” individuals who, in the view of the liberal State, are prevented from making the wholly free choices of liberal agents. At the heart of liberalism is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. If liberal theory posits the existence of such individuals in an imaginary “state of nature,” liberal practice – beginning, but not limited to the rise of commerce – seeks to expand the conditions for the realization of the individual. The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that pre-existed the liberal state, if not by force (though that may at times be necessary), then by constantly lowering the costs and barriers to exit. The State lays claim to govern all groupings within the society – it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, the only ontological realities are the individual and the State. (for evidence of this fact, consider the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan). Eventually the State lays claim to set up its own education system to ensure that children are not overly shaped by family, religion or any particular community; through its legal and police powers, it will occasionally forces open “closed” communities as soon as one person claims some form of unjust assertion of authority or limits upon individual freedom; it even regulates what is regarded to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious worship. Marriage is a bond that must be subject to its definition. A vast and intrusive centralized apparatus is established not to oppress the population, but rather to actively ensure the liberation of individuals from any forms of constitutive groups or supra-individual identity. Any allegiance to sub-national groups, associations or communities come to be redefined not as inheritances, but as memberships of choice with very low if any costs to exit. Modern liberals are to be pro-choice in every respect; one can limits one’s own autonomy¸ but only if one has chosen to do so, and generally only if one can revise one’s choice at a later date – which means, in reality, one hasn’t really limited one’s autonomy at all. All choices are fungible, alterable, and reversible. The vow “til death do us part” is subtly but universally amended – and understood – to mean, “or until we choose otherwise.”

*** *** ***

Various forms of Statism thus arise quite logically from these basic aspects of the liberal system. Progressive philosophy agrees fundamentally with the liberal vision of the liberation of the individual from all partial and mediating institutions, but eventually comes to include the State itself as one of those partial and limiting associations. This follows with iron and inevitable logic: if the State is the creation of individuals, then eventually the State itself needs to be abolished to achieve the thoroughgoing liberty of the individual from all partial associations. Marxism’s dream of the “withering away of the State” is a logical extension of the trajectory of liberalism.

It is here that Robert Nisbet notices some additional relationships between the two. It is only when the variety of institutions and organizations of humankind’s social life have been eviscerated – when the individual experiences himself as an individual – that collectivism as a theory becomes plausible as a politics in fact. Liberalism’s successful liberation of individuals from what had historically been “their own” and the increasing realization of the “individual” made it possible for the theory of cosmopolitanism to arise as an actionable political program in the modern era. The idea that we could supercede all particular attachments and achieve a kind of “cosmic consciousness” or experience of our “species being” was a direct consequence of the lived experience of individualism. Locke is the midwife to Marx, in a manner of speaking.

Nisbet also notes the psychological conditions arising from liberalism’s unfolding that also give rise to a longing for collectivism. He argued that collectivism arises as a reaction against the atomization of liberalism. The active dissolution of traditional human communities and institutions provokes a violent reaction in which a basic human need – “the quest for community” – is no longer being met. As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture – and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy – we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man – the State. Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities – shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man became susceptible to the quest for belonging now to distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, now in the Church of the State itself. Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and even the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes – following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”

Lastly, collectivism arises logically from classical liberalism out of sheer necessity. Having shorn human ties to the vast web of intermediating institutions that sustained people through good and bad times, the expansion of the experience of individualism renders humans bereft of recourse to those traditional places of support and sustenance. The more individuated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals will inevitably turn to the State for help in times of need. This observation – made before Nisbet most powerfully by Tocqueville – suggests that individualism is not the alternative to Statism, but its very cause. As Tocqueville wrote in v. 2, bk. iv, ch. 3 of Democracy in America,

Since … no one is obliged to lend his force to those like him and no one has the right to expect great support from those like him, each [person] is at once independent and weak. These two states – which must neither be viewed separately nor confused – give the citizen of democracies very contrary instincts. His independence fills him with confidence and pride among his equals, and his debility makes him feel, from time to time, the need of the outside help that he cannot expect from any of them, since they are all impotent and cold. In this extremity, he naturally turns his regard to the immense being [the tutelary, bureaucratic, centralized State] that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement. His needs and above all his desires constantly lead him back toward it, and in the end he views it as the unique and necessary support for his individual weakness.” (644)

Far from fundamentally opposing one another, the individualism arising from the philosophy of classical liberalism and the subsequent philosophy of collectivism have been mutually reinforcing. Indeed, they have powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of the ancient conception of virtue as a practice or even an option. Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for the end-game – whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community,” but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on essential means to achieve their distinct ends, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.

To the extent that modern "conservatism" has embraced the arguments of classical liberalism, the actions and policies of its political actors have never failed to actively undermine those areas of life that "conservatives" claim to seek to defend. Partly this is due to drift, but more worringly, it is due to the increasingly singular embrace by many contemporary Americans – whether liberal or “conservative” – of a modern definition of liberty that consists in doing as one likes through the conquest of nature, rather than the achievement of self-governance within the limits of our nature and the natural world. Unless we recover a different, older, and better definition and language of liberty, our future is more likely than not to be one not of final liberation of the individual, but our accustomed and deeply pernicious oscillation between the atomization of our Lockean individualism and the cry to be taken care of by the only remaining entity that is left standing in the liberal settlement, the State. If we care about liberty, we need rather to attend to our States and localities, our communities and neighborhoods, our families and Churches, making them viable alternatives and counterpoints to the monopolization of individual and State in our time, and thus to relearn the ancient virtue of self-government.

The Tocqueville Forum

2011-07-21T06:23:00.007-05:00

Here's a nice birthday present for me - an excerpt from the latest edition of Choosing the Right College, from the section on Georgetown University.

"The most outstanding resource that Georgetown students should explore is the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, whose purpose is to highlight 'the two main roots of American democracy, Western political philosophy and the biblical and Christian religious tradition.' Its founding director, Professor Patrick Deneen, is a leading scholar in classical political theory and a popular cultural commentator. The forum offers lectures and conferences featuring first-rate authorities ranging from Andrew Bacevich to Patrick Fagan, and also serves as a meeting place for many of the most thoughtful students on campus."

I started this program five years ago, and I couldn't agree more that the program draws together "many of the most thoughtful students on campus." It's been a labor of love, and a deeply rewarding one at that. An even better birthday present would be a growing number of Georgetown alumnni supporters. If you are a graduate or know any, I hope you'll consider lending support or passing on the word.

Caylee's Law and the Specter of Civil Breakdown

2011-07-11T12:22:00.002-05:00

In the wake of the "not guilty" finding in the Casey Anthony trial, large numbers of outraged individuals have begun a campaign for the creation of various State and even a Federal version of "Caylee's Law." In addition to such an effort in the state of Florida, similar legislation is being explored in states such as Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia. This law would promulgate strict requirements under which parents or guardians would be expected to report a missing and deceased child to police. Under such a law, it can be presumed, such actions as that of Casey Anthony would have led to a guilty verdict - if not for murder, at least on the scandal of a parent failing to report a missing child.

The law is clearly a response to the outrage and anger felt by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict. Yet, what would be the expected efficacy of such a law? Can it really be expected that it would deter what must be a infinitesimally small number of parents who would not immediately call the police at the slightest suspicion of a missing child? (Let's face it - if anything, most parents are likely to contact authorities before checking all the likely places a child might be).

The pressure to pass such a law is most obviously an expression of thwarted vengeance, an outburst of outrage and frustration toward someone the public believes got away not only with murder, but the murder of her own small child. This is an understandable human response.

But it seems also plausible that the pressure to pass such a law reflects more deeply the anxieties and fears of many that the fabric of informal social norms have become so frayed that only the impotent passage of largely pointless laws can give some comfort in the belief that there is some kind of replacement. What strikes one about Anthony's is how relatively "normal" they are in today's America. The Anthony's had moved to Florida from Ohio, indicating a normal "mobile" American lifestyle. They live in a suburban neighborhood in Orlando, one of innumerable such "communities" where people can live in relative anonymity amid proximate families. As of 2006, there were 12.9 million single parents raising over 21 million children. Some four million of those single parents live with their parents. The stories of Casey's insecure employment history is not unusual for many young people today, particularly for under-educated single mothers. The anxiety provoked by the Casey Anthony story is not born of the perception of someone so wildly different from the way many Americans live today; it arises from the deeper perception that this is the way that many more of us are likely to live in America today.

In his recent book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama seeks to explore the question of how more advanced industrial societies have moved away from "kinship relations" of more "primitive" societies to more complex societies of strangers in which our relationships are based on impersonal legal and economic relationships. Fukuyama - still evincing his characteristic progressive worldview - regards these advances as an inevitability of evolution itself, a sign of our greater advancement. But these very "advances" render us increasingly strangers even to those near to us - not only our neighbors, but our own children and parents. Our liberation from "kinship" is based upon our increased ability to artificially create radical forms of isolation from even those kinship relations. As Fukuyama correctly notes, "that individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts" (29).

The calls for lawmakers to "do something" in the wake of the Casey Anthony "not guilty" verdict shows the limits of our impersonal age. Lacking confidence in the remnants of the social norms (not legalisms) upon which those kinship cultures were based, we turn now to the law to instruct fellow citizens how to behave with their children. The passage of such laws, far from indicating a triumph of our greater civility, reveals its unceasing attenuation and even breakdown. Our anxieties will only be stoked, not relieved, and each "solution" will only exacerbate the root causes of our deeper alienation.

Wilson Carey McWilliams

2011-06-12T13:19:00.003-05:00

Some, perhaps many readers here will know that I learned much of what I know of political philosophy - and, much of my understanding of life - from one of the most wonderful men who has trod the earth, Wilson Carey McWilliams. Professor McWilliams - who taught at Rutgers University for thirty years, in addition to some years at Oberlin and Brooklyn Colleges and stints at Haverford, Harvard, and Fordham - was a legendary teacher, lecturer, and raconteur. I was blessed to have taken many of his classes during my undergraduate years at Rutgers, and traded a spot at University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought to finish my Ph.D. studies under his tutelage some years later. He was a mentor and good friend during my formative years of young adulthood, and I would doubtless be doing something very different than what I do now but for his guidance and encouragement.

Carey - as he was widely known - passed away suddenly in 2005. While he was widely known and admired in the circles of academic political philosophy, and his admirers in the political domain included the likes of E.J. Dionne and Karl Rove (yes, seriously!), even those who knew him were largely unaware of the vast body of writings that he left behind. Over the past few years I've worked with his daughter - Susan McWilliams of Pomona College, also known to many through her posts at Front Porch Republic - to collect some of his best writing in two separate volumes, both of which have now been published. I hope that those readers who have been interested in my writing here will acquire - through purchase or borrowing, perhaps all means short of theft - both collections of his writings. They are a compendium of essays containing political, philosophical, theological and common-sense justifications for many of the positions that I've come to argue here on these pages (though my scribblings evince far less subtlety and learning than those of Carey's). Also know that I recommend these books without pecuniary interest - all royalties will go toward an endowed award named for Carey, bestowed annually by the Politics, Literature and Film section of the American Political Science Association.

The two books differ somewhat in character. The first is entitled Redeeming Democracy in America, published by the University Press of Kansas. Carey was co-editor - along with historian Lance Banning - of a renowned series on American Political Thought published by Kansas. Fittingly, this book contains some of Carey's best writing about American political thought, drawing on his vast corpus of writings on his understanding of the non-liberal "alternative tradition" in the American tradition.

The second - just released - is entitled The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, from the University Press of Kentucky. This book - as the title suggests - is more of an omnibus reader, and includes many of Carey's best essays on a broad range of topics, ranging from his 60's and 70's writing on issues of civil disobedience, to his writings about particular thinkers (including not-to-be-missed essays on Reinhold Niebuhr, Bertrand de Jouvenel, George Orwell and Leo Strauss), to his late reflections on the (sorry, but not hopeless) state of contemporary American politics.

Each book has extra goodies: the Kansas book has a comprehensive bibliography of McWilliams's writings (we've only been able to gather about a third of his published essays alone in these two volumes, not to mention his many reviews, co-authored articles and political commentary); while the Kentucky volume contains a lengthier introduction on McWilliams's contribution and approach to American thought and political philosophy. Both volumes are highly recommended, and readers will find in the pages of these two books a highly original, deeply learned, and profoundly challenging way of thinking about our time, place, and legacy.

Assuming that many readers have not encountered McWilliams before, I will include below a substantial extract from the introduction from The Democratic Soul. I hope it will be sufficient to whet your appetites and move you to consider reading directly from the pages and words of my teacher and my friend, Wilson Carey McWilliams.

___________________________________

“A Better Sort of Love”:
On the Life and Thought of Wilson Carey McWilliams
1933-2005

Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams

I.
Wilson Carey McWilliams was born on September 2, 1933, in Santa Monica, California. His was a pre-freeway, pre-plastic Los Angeles: a city of barely more than a million people still dominated by what he later remembered as a “provincial, boosterish” mind-set, with “its numberless improbabilities always hinting at great possibilities.”

It was also a city that McWilliams experienced not as a “city of strangers,” but as the home of his large, extended family. By his own account, it was a family of titans. His mother’s family, the Hedricks, were a formidable clan of German and Dutch descent who placed great emphasis on education – sending all daughters as well as sons to college, long before doing so was considered fashionable or even appropriate. During McWilliams’s childhood, his grandfather, Earle Raymond Hedrick, a renowned mathematician and associate of Albert Einstein’s, served as the Provost and Vice-President of the University of California, Los Angeles, and was well ensconced in the city’s intellectual elite. McWilliams’s maternal grandmother received a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Gőttingen before having her twelve children. McWilliams was surrounded by Hedrick aunts and uncles, most of whom were educators and many of whom had advanced degrees. His mother, Dorothy Hedrick McWilliams, was a UCLA graduate who spent her career as a high-school teacher.

If his mother’s family were titans of the academic sort, his father’s family were titans with a decidedly political bent. McWilliams’s grandfather, who died before he was born, had been a prominent cattle-rancher and Democratic State Senator in Colorado. And his father, Carey McWilliams, was a California journalist then best known for his writings about migrant farm labor, who would go on to edit The Nation magazine. The elder McWilliams, a self-proclaimed radical, was from early on a prominent public figure, targeted and often threatened for his then-controversial commitment to racial equality and his attention to the marginal and disenfranchised.

In light of these early familial influences, it seems almost fated that McWilliams became a political scientist, a relentless intellectual and dedicated educator possessed of an unusually keen political insight and committed to seeking the wisdom contained in unpopular or “alternative” points of view.

But the familial comfort of those earliest years was not the only formative influence on McWilliams’s life, for, like the provincial Los Angeles of his youth, it was not to last. His parents decided to dissolve their marriage in 1941, necessitating a brief move to Reno, Nevada – the establishment of residency in that state then being the easiest way to acquire a no-fault divorce – and then a series of subsequent moves around California. The transience of those years provided a stark contrast with what had come before, surely underpinning much of McWilliams’s later emphasis on the value of rootedness and his attention to the costs of America’s culture of mobility.

McWilliams and his mother eventually settled in the Central Valley town of Merced, where in 1951 he graduated from Merced High School. It was in Merced that McWilliams first discovered and refined his skills as a debater – William F. Buckley, Jr., would later call McWilliams the most formidable debater in the United States – as a member of his school’s forensics team. And Merced’s then farm-country, railroad-town charms reinforced his appreciation for small and local communities.

McWilliams graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1955, funded in part through a U.S. Army ROTC scholarship, and after graduation he served in the 11th Airborne Division of the U.S. Army for two years, remaining in active reserve service with the 91st Division until 1961. Having considered but ultimately deciding against a lifetime military career, he returned to Berkeley, where he received his master’s and doctorate degrees under the tutelage of the eminent political theorists Norman Jacobson, John Schaar, and Sheldon Wolin. Each of these great teachers influenced McWilliams in distinct ways, but all together instilled in him a deep and abiding love of the great texts and arguments of the history of political thought. Speaking about Wolin at the time of his retirement, McWilliams’s words might summarize his experience of all three of his teachers: “A secular agora, [their] classrooms were also part sanctuary, places where politics took on a grace and mystery.” At Berkeley, McWilliams also helped to found the activist student group SLATE, one of the first formal organizations of the New Left.

In 1961, McWilliams took a position in the Government Department at Oberlin College, where he involved himself in the ferment of the 1960s and found great success as a classroom teacher. Largely based on his energizing experience at Oberlin, McWilliams would remain a fierce advocate of liberal-arts colleges all his life, although he left Oberlin in 1967 to spend most of the rest of his career at larger universities: first at Brooklyn College and then at Rutgers University, where he taught from 1970 until his death in 2005. McWilliams had also had visiting and summer appointments at Berkeley, Fordham University, Harvard University, Haverford College, Lafayette College, the State University of New York at Buffalo, UCLA, and Yale University. At all those institutions, McWilliams sought out the company of students, preferring face-to-face mentorship in and out of the classroom to the more impersonal formats of academic publishing.

And yet, as this volume testifies, McWilliams’ publication record was substantial in terms of both scope and quality. His most famous work, The Idea of Fraternity in America, appeared in 1973 to high acclaim, receiving the National Historical Society Prize in 1974. He became a prolific essayist, writing regularly in journals such as Commonweal and Newsday and throughout his career dividing his time equally between high theoretical examination and penetrating contemporary political analysis. He wrote extraordinarily well-regarded essays on the meaning of each American presidential election, essays that were eventually collected in his two later volumes, The Politics of Disappointment (1995) and Beyond the Politics of Disappointment (2000).

McWilliams was the recipient of numerous professional honors, including the John Witherspoon Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities. He taught a series of summer seminars for teachers under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and served on several editorial boards. He held key positions in the American Political Science Association, including Vice-President and Secretary, and he was active at Rutgers on numerous committees and task forces.

But it is worth noting that for the last 30 years of his life, McWilliams cultivated his community life alongside his professional one. He made a home with his wife, the psychoanalyst and author Nancy Riley McWilliams, in Flemington, New Jersey. There, they had two daughters, and McWilliams became a fixture of the local scene, serving briefly as a town councilman and spending many terms as an elected member of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee. He was an elder in the Flemington Presbyterian Church and a member of the Hunterdon County Historical Society – living, much as he taught his students to live, a life made valuable through citizenship, association, sacrifice, and friendship.

II.

In one of his last publications, McWilliams’s description of the novelist James Baldwin might easily apply to himself: “He was a fervent critic of the American regime because he was an anguished lover, and nothing is clearer in [his] work than the depth of his concern for American public life and culture.” McWilliams too, was an “anguished lover” of America, discerning that it was a nation born at least partly of the Enlightenment that was worthy of love not because of its official philosophy, but in spite of it. Throughout his writing, McWilliams recommended “a better sort of love”: the love between and among citizens, one evoking an older model of citizens as friends – and not the self-love that lies at the heart of liberal theory and that at least in part officially undergirded the American founding.

The kernel of McWilliams’s thought lies in his insight that the official creed of America – the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke, premised upon the belief of humans to be pre-politically individual and whole – is fundamentally a false anthropology, and thus cannot serve as the basis of a viable regime. To the extent that liberalism seemed to have proven itself to be successful, McWilliams argued that it was the result of a pre-liberal inheritance that relied on non-liberal assumptions and relationships – particularly those at the heart of the family and the neighborhood, but also ones that must infuse the schools, the economy, and ultimately the polity itself. “Liberal society is a kind of moral school which must be protected against the logic of liberal theory, walled off and governed according to different precepts,” he argued. Rather, he held, America’s better and truer pedigree lie in its “unofficial” founding, that “alternative tradition” he plumbed often in its religious, literary and immigrant traditions. Calling it “America’s Second Voice,” he discerned in such authors and thinkers ranging from the Puritans, the Anti-federalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Kurt Vonnegut, and such political figures as Thomas Jefferson (sometimes), Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, William Howard Taft, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, evocative cadences of that “second voice.” Above all, McWilliams heard that voice in Alexis de Tocqueville, that great interpreter of America, to whose insights he returned again and again. He found in Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy in America the exhortation for America to aspire to be its best self – to pursue that “better sort of love” – and, in eschewing our temptation to credit self-interest as our most fundamental motivation, to cease doing “more honor to our philosophy than to ourselves.”

In one of his earliest publications – co-authored with his teacher, John Schaar – McWilliams set out a basic premise that would guide his thought thereafter.

The political process is an effort to unite men in the pursuit of a common goal and vision. Politics, then, involves two questions: the question of “with whom” and the question of “for what.” Furthermore, it involves these questions in precisely that order.

Modern politics stressed “for what” – its view was utilitarian and instrumental, aimed at understanding human relations as a means to achieve particular desired ends of individuals. Modern thought, beginning with Machiavelli, placed the “for what” question first, viewing the “with whom” question as secondary – subject to convenience and shifting need. According to liberal theory, the public realm exists to serve the private. McWilliams sought to evoke an older tradition in which the private was subordinate to the common weal. In an evocative phrase, he argued that politics is itself a main avenue toward taming the “idolatry of self”; by contrast, modern theory turned this “idolatry” into its main orthodoxy. To the extent that the ends of politics become detached from the goal of reinforcing the goods of solidarity in political and community life itself, those ends tend toward destruction of a fundamental human good of our shared human life. The question of “with whom” conditions – even limits – the possible range of answers to the question of “for what.” Questions of what politics should seek to achieve will necessarily be conditioned by the question, “In what way will our activities support and improve our common life?”

Liberalism, McWilliams consistently argued, was not neutral toward ultimate ends, in spite of some claims of its main proponents. According to McWilliams’s analysis of early modern thought in such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, and as distilled in its practical expression in the thought of the Founders – especially Madison and Hamilton – politics was to be arranged to increase human power and mastery. According to liberal theory, individuals are understood by nature to be “free and independent,” and accede to form and join political community only as a second-best option, preferring in their respective hearts to be unfettered and ungoverned. Law is experienced as an imposition upon natural freedom, a necessary but onerous compromise with the reality of other self-interested humans. A consistent theme in liberal thought is that these inconveniences and compromises are acceptable because of what we ultimately gain in return – namely, the ability to master nature and a resulting increase in human power. As a result, our condition as individuals is apparently improved: while we remain under the impositions of positive law – and, indeed, as the power of the State must increase concomitant with the growth of power over nature – we appear to escape the rule of nature’s law, achieving greater liberation as individuals than would have been possible in a State of Nature. Political organization is thus a means to achieving the original desired ends of the individual, namely power and mastery. Liberalism – hardly neutral about ends – contains a deeper teaching, and organizes the polity to achieve the ends of that particular pedagogy.

Ancient conflict within and between communities over ends – the stuff from which politics itself arose and which it sought to contain, yet which is always fraught with the threat of outright conflict and violence – was to be replaced by a set of aims and activities that demoted politics to the status of handmaiden to the modern project of mastery. Politics was largely to become subservient to technique, itself becoming a science – “the new science of politics.” Modern political thought appeared to subordinate concern with ends for the promotion of means, above all, various techniques based upon that new science. Liberalism’s apparent indifference to ends – its vaunted relativism – masks its deeper devotion to power and mastery, particularly the modern project of nature’s conquest along with the aim of material increase through a deeply individualistic economic arrangement. Modern politics contained a teaching that shaped the human soul over time, transforming all institutions and human aspirations in its image. Among its most effective tutors was the market: McWilliams argued often that it was commerce, more than any other feature of modern life, that introduced radical relativism and deep instability even into the heart of those parts of life that needed to be resistant to its corrosive effects, especially the family, schools and community. “The great commercial republic, the Framer’s creation, is always threatened by the market, its central social institution…. The market … teaches us to see all virtues and goods, all allegiances and loyalties, as so many ‘values,’ prices set by and shifting with the vacillations of the market and of opinion.”

Building on the lessons of the market, perhaps what the great liberal project above all taught modern man was a habituation in detachment, and all that follows. Freedom, it was understood, consists in our relative lack of obligations and duties, our ability – indeed, the inescapable necessity – for mobility and absenteeism. Understanding and tracing the consequences of this inculcated tendency toward detachment is a major theme in McWilliams’s work, not only because it constitutes a real psychic loss in our ability to form lasting and stable relations, but because of its unintended deleterious social and political consequences, particularly a disposition not to care sufficiently to seek to secure the common weal. The result of the insecurity and instability of our civic domain, McWilliams (following Tocqueville) observed, is that the public realm comes to be seen as “the theater of indignity”; liberal citizens are prone to seek meaning in retreat from this sphere where they are insignificant and weak, shorn of the bonds and connections that Tocqueville praised as arising from a habituation in “the arts of association.” They are “disposed to barricade themselves in private life, where they find a measure of significance and control.”

In the absence of the kinds of civic training Tocqueville commended, liberty came to be defined not as a kind of “discipline of freedom,” but as the relative lack of constraint upon individuals. The attendant growth in various kinds of human power – scientific, technological, and military, among others –obliterated obstacles to the human will and reshaped the world in the image and likeness of the unencumbered individual. A form of democratic liberty – what Aristotle defined as “ruling and being ruled in turn” – was substituted for the aspiration of “not being ruled at all.” What most contemporary people understood to be the very heart of the definition of democracy – freedom as lack of constraint – was, for McWilliams, the polar opposite of democracy. And the pursuit of the theory presented modern democratic man with unforeseen privations. The theory that had been developed to advance thoroughgoing human liberty – requiring endless efforts to increase techniques of mastery – left humans increasingly subject to the very powers that had been unleashed. Largely incapable of understanding the complexities of modern life, rendered mute and insignificant by a vast and impersonal nation-state, and buffeted by titanic powers that were often “private” and increasingly ungovernable, the modern democratic citizen experienced a radically different outcome than that which had been promised by the modern project. Isolated, voiceless, and civically powerless, they would find that a crass materialism and feeble claim to autonomy had replaced the noble calling of citizenship and self-rule. Thus, not only was the practical consequence of this re-definition of liberty an intense violence done to nature in the form of environmental degradation – but a similar violence was also done to human nature, namely a profound deformation of the human soul itself.

III.

McWilliams believed that a main impulse to be resisted in considering problems of contemporary politics was that of seeking solutions based on “technique,” that is, an approach to politics that resorted to the same motivation from which arose the deepest challenges presented by modern politics. Most policy proposals – even those of a “communitarian bent” – were content to base proposed solutions within the structural framework of the liberal regime, insuring that they would necessarily be swamped by the regime’s deeper individualist assumptions. McWilliams believed that most such endeavors were doomed, if not likely to worsen our condition. Before indulging a reforming impulse that was likely to be born of the same source as the “new science of politics,” McWilliams held that deep reflection upon the truth of our condition was necessary. In the first instance, he believed, action should be preceded by a right understanding of our condition – an understanding that needed to be ruthlessly honest about the daunting nature of the modern political challenge. Secondly – based upon that understanding – thinking about politics needed to be both radical and modest: radical in its aims to change the fundamental assumptions about politics, but modest in its recognition of what could realistically be done in the context of modern nation state. McWilliams – borrowing a phrase he once used to describe his one-time teacher, Bertrand de Jouvenel – sought to “bring the old gods to a new city,” but in a way that understood that any such effort would require “sacrifice and patience more than dazzling exploits.”

Above all, he held that any effort to remediate the modern retreat into the private and the individual must begin – as Tocqueville understood – by shoring up those pre- and non-liberal sources that long co-existed alongside America’s liberal self-understanding. Ironically, the source of the improvement of civic life would come largely from sustaining and strengthening largely “private” institutions.

Many "private" institutions—most notably, families, churches, and local communities—have often taught an older creed which speaks more easily of the public as a whole, appealing to patriotism, duty, and the common good. Of course, these private bodies have been influenced, increasingly, by the liberalism and "modernism" of our public culture, and they articulate the more traditional view only infrequently, incoherently, and apologetically. Nevertheless, the “private” order shaped the American character, in part, in terms of a teaching that human beings are limited creatures, subject to the law of nature, born dependent and—by nature—in need of nurturance and moral education.

McWilliams was a defender of the “traditional” family not out of romantic traditionalism, but rather because he understood that the family, like church and community, is based on a set of human commitments that rub against the grain of liberal individualist assumptions. This understanding led McWilliams toward what might be called “populist” sympathies, to supporting the sorts of traditional associations and commitments suspected and attacked by a range of historical liberal and “progressive” actors (the sort of “elites” excoriated by a kindred spirit and friend, Christopher Lasch). McWilliams defended not merely groups – in this, he was no trendy supporter of “multiculturalism” – but groups whose basis reflected commitments based in loyalty, memory and place.

It was private or semi-public entities such as the family or political parties that were the training ground of community life within the larger frame of the modern nation state. While relying upon these pre-liberal institutions, the modern state also subtly undermined all such inheritances, remaking them in the image of liberal assumptions, and thus diluting their affective ties. McWilliams understood that the liberal state was purposefully designed to separate humans, to encourage the assumption that we are at base physical bodies that come temporarily into contact without any natural or teleological relational basis. The vastness and impersonality of the nation-state was part of the intentional design of liberal theory, intended at once to advance the modern project of mastery, while making public life so impersonal and distant as to render modern liberal citizens more likely to favor withdrawal into private life and affairs. While seeming to ensure our dignity – mainly in the form of individual rights – modern arrangements tended instead to undermine the affective basis of every pre-liberal human institution, rendering us ever more alone and isolated, and bribing us instead by visions of autonomy and a taste of power that distracted us from our effective powerlessness.

McWilliams appealed to an older teaching – one he gleaned from ancient Greek philosophy as well as the Biblical tradition – that understood community to be the natural home of humans, and political association to be the natural schoolteacher of shared self-government. Politics, according to McWilliams, is a kind of teacher of the human soul – not, as liberal theory held, a necessary inconvenience upon our natural freedom. It is a tutor that makes true human freedom possible, above all the freedom gained in self-government. From Plato and Aristotle in particular, he absorbed the lesson that political life requires a fundamentally small setting wherein interpersonal relations can be fostered. Drawing particularly on an Aristotelian teleology, McWilliams held that politics is natural to the extent that human flourishing requires formation within well-formed political communities. Liberal theory understood rightly that humans tend to experience themselves as separate bodies, but this theory stopped short of a fuller comprehension. At best and under good conditions, humans can be drawn out of this individualized existence, coming to see the extent to which the good life rests upon political life. Yet the human capacity to understand and embrace a shared conception of the good life beyond fulfillment of our immediate desires is not infinite and hence needs a bounded and palpable scale. Modern politics rejected this teaching, beginning and ending with our fundamental separation, and concluding that vast scale is the best setting for the satisfaction of such selves. From the ancients McWilliams learned otherwise.

The Biblical tradition echoed this teaching using different lyrics but the same basic harmonics. Largely relying on Calvinist bearings, McWilliams understood Biblical teaching to stress the fact of human fallenness, our partiality, our pride, and our need for stern but loving guidance. Humans strain against limits and law but, properly tutored, can come to embrace those constraints as a self-imposed discipline, thereby achieving a better freedom. Particularly evidenced in God’s actions upon Israel, the Bible teaches that politics plays a vital role in this education of the soul. “Political society needs to limit and constrain its citizens, demanding sacrifice and punishing them when needed. In so doing, it imitates – in a small, relatively effective way – God’s desolation of pride. At the same time, a good political order nurtures, educates, and improves its citizens: its chastenings are intended to teach the lesson that the whole is a good order.” McWilliams was largely unique among contemporary “communitarian” thinkers in stressing that the communitarian strain in American thought – and, indeed, the broader Western tradition – if originating with the Greeks, had in many respects been deepened and more fully conveyed through the Biblical tradition. Like Tocqueville, he located the American founding not in 1776 or 1789, but with the Puritan settlement of New England. He argued that America’s first efforts of self-understanding derived from sources like John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arbella, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he urged fellow citizens to “delight in each other; make other's conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” In both his writings and his riveting lectures in and beyond the classroom, McWilliams stressed that politics is always fundamentally about teaching, instructing us, above all, to seek the excellence of citizenship, a condition aimed at achieving civic equality through the discipline of freedom.

IV.

Although McWilliams was largely tentative about suggesting explicit activities for government in this effort to strengthen local communities and associations, he held that such succor was inescapably necessary. He excoriated “conservatives” whose anti-government animus often veiled their willingness to support a market economy that relentlessly undermined the very kinds of associations that undergird the “traditional values” that they claim to support (Ronald Reagan was a frequent target of McWilliams’s withering criticism – among other things, for his fondness for quoting that impious revolutionary, Thomas Paine). Yet McWilliams was also aware of the paradox that our situation presented: support from central government against the corrosive tendencies of the market is inescapable, but too often the government itself is a partner in those activities. His arguments largely sought to clear the way for a new and different understanding of what government ought to aim to achieve – mainly, the ambition to give primary allegiance to “with whom,” and thus informed, “for what.”

For citizenship, in any case, government is indispensible to any solution, and only incidentally is part of the problem. The school of citizenship is small, personal and local, and in that sphere, ‘getting government out of the way’ does not ‘empower’ citizens: it leaves them nakedly exposed to forces that are titanic, impersonal and international. Citizens need stronger governments to give localities power as well as responsibility and to reduce the extent to which ‘getting involved’ is an exercise in frustration. In fact, government is the target of so much resentment because it is relatively responsive: citizens can vote against school budgets and elected officials, but not against technological change. Our anger at government is a mark of its humanity, just as democratic citizenship, to the extent that we can preserve and revitalize it, gives us voices against the grey silence of our time.

McWilliams suggested elsewhere that while modern governments are “too clumsy and impersonal to promote friendship directly, they can at least be friendly to friendship.”

His understanding of the fundamental need – indeed, the basic dignity – of political life drew him inexorably to the Left. For all of McWilliams’s differences with Marx, he was always committed to the Left side of the modern political landscape. This was most obviously the case during his active years in the student movement at Berkeley, and is also evident in his lifelong devotion to the Democratic party. More deeply, McWilliams’s critique of the theory of liberalism, and its close social ally, the capitalist market economy, drew him away from the contemporary Right. To the extent that the Right in America tended toward vociferous defenses of liberalism and particularly its economic arrangements – and was often the font of hostility toward the successive wave of immigrant groups who embodied the “second voice” of American thought, including that tragic group of unwilling immigrants, African slaves and their progeny – McWilliams found in the Left and the Democratic Party his natural home.

Yet, McWilliams’s relationship to the Left was anguished. He broke early with friends who opposed the Vietnam War, and throughout his life was a severe critic of Communism and most modern ideologies of progress. His defense of family and other “traditional” arrangements, his criticisms of the idea of a “right to choose,” a “right to privacy,” his defense of the “great books” – among other positions – made him at least as often a critic of modern “liberals” and “progressives,” as apt to find among his political compatriots on the Left a betrayal of a fundamental commitments to politics as he did among those on the Right. He admired the arguments advanced by conservatives such as Allan Bloom, and counted him – and many other conservatives – among his friends and allies. Yet, far from experiencing alienation from the Left or the Right, the very source of his discomfort with elements across the contemporary political spectrum was also the basis of at least partial agreement with nearly everyone he encountered: aided by his wit and sense of humor – punctuated by countless anecdotes and a fondness for bourbon – along with his uncanny ability to forge political alliances, he easily made friends and companions across the entire political spectrum.

For McWilliams, politics is finally ennobling not only for teaching the truth about our human condition – one of dependency and mutual need, and as a calling toward the achievement of the common good – but finally to the extent that it points us beyond even the limits of politics. McWilliams constantly affirmed that politics teaches us our partiality – points us toward the whole – but that politics itself is finally only partial. It is a part that aspires toward the whole; the community itself calls us outside ourselves, but it too must ultimately be cognizant of its own partiality, even as it aspires to a kind of partial completeness. “At best, politics encourages us toward philoso¬phy and toward religion, toward a concern for the truth and for the nature of things.” Politics is the point of departure toward an understanding of the nature of the created order; at the same time, philosophy and religion alike must be cognizant of the limits or at least need for prudence that are placed upon that examination of the whole, given the necessity of the human community that encourages and even makes possible their examinations.

McWilliams expressed this tension at the heart of “political philosophy” with simple eloquence on the occasion of his reception of the 1989 John Witherspoon Award from the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities.

I think that Plato was right: at bottom, human beings are yearning animals, who want more than is simply or narrowly human. They want perfect things, answers to great riddles, beauty that endures, Being that is now and always, justice without fault or error. But if we seek the perfect in things, persons or governments of this world, we will be disappointed – and worse, we will fail to appreciate their decencies and real achievements. We need the critical comparison and argument between high things and our lower striving, between Socrates who is human and our own incomplete humanity. Even the most successful practice does not make perfect though it does make better; but we cannot recognize what is better without some inkling of what is best.

Thus, for McWilliams, politics ultimately points beyond itself. Politics is a means to a further end, the appreciation of the whole and of the truth that we are necessarily always only partly able to grasp. Politics is thus the inescapable condition of human creatures, a sphere of education about our true selves that give us dignity and meaning. It is to be informed by the goal of seeking the common good of our fellows and compatriots – through the medium of citizenship – but finally it must be aware of its own limits and shortcomings, pointing beyond any of those commitments to a whole that exceeds our earthly grasp. In this, McWilliams was finally a partisan of philosophy and religion, the highest pursuits nevertheless always moderated by the real experience and essential reality of political life, that condition of being human among humans. He sought to ennoble and chasten, pointing us simultaneously to the high aspirations of the true and eternal things and to the earthy reality of our diurnal political existence. And so – as the chapters of this book demonstrate – he was a passionate student of the great thinkers and a lover of the rough-and-tumble, a singular combination of philosopher and politico with a bit of saint and rapscallion mixed together. These essays are a partial testimony to the breadth and scope of his vision, to a deep and profound learning that will awe and humble, and to the wisdom of a lover of political and human things. This book will at least will serve as a reminder of that man admired and missed by many, and as an introduction to those who have come too late to enjoy his capacious laughter and embraces.

I Win

2011-06-02T21:36:00.009-05:00

Pay up, Hayward.

(Original gauntlet here).

Hayward's prediction: oil at or below $75/barrel on June 2, 2011.

Todays' closing price: $100.29/bbl. Don't worry, it will go higher still.

I'd love a hardbound copy of Carroll Quigley's classic The Evolution of Civilizations. He was a famed Georgetown professor - an achievement worthy of aspiration. He should also be remembered for decrying Georgetown's path to self-immolation in its frantic efforts to throw off its grounding in Catholicism in favor of academic fashion - already back in 1967. Prescient. If he could see us now...

You can have it sent to:

PJD
Department of Government
Georgetown University
37th and O Sts, NW.
Washington, DC 20057

The Future of American Democracy

2011-05-26T02:50:00.004-05:00

This week I have been lecturing at the Ignatianum Academy in Krakow, Poland. It has been a marvelous experience thus far, including time spent in the classroom with bright students, as well as evenings spent dining with wonderful new and old friends in this beautiful city.

Last night I was invited to deliver a public lecture on the subject of "The Future of Democracy in America." While I don't break any new ground here (well, I never really break new ground - I just go over ground that seems less trodden these days), the talk was well-received, and I post it here for those who may be interested.

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The Future of American Democracy
Ignatianum Academy
Krakow, Poland
May 25, 2011

I am very grateful to be with you tonight, and deeply honored by your presence. I have been deeply moved by this ancient city, with its rich history, its tragedies and its triumphs, its stunning beauty, and particularly by the piety of its people. To see the churches here in the heart of Europe filled with worshippers, and the many signs of Poland’s special devotion to the Virgin Mother and the great joy that has accompanied the beatification of the Blessed Pope John Paul II, has been very hope-giving.

I have been invited to speak to you about the “future of democracy in America,” a daunting topic, and one that may deserve a question mark at the end of the title. There are, of course, many particular issues pertaining to contemporary politics that must be of interest to you – particularly in light of an impending visit by President Obama to your country at week's end, and the increased discussions of another upcoming election for the Presidency. I expect I may disappoint some of you by failing to address some of these pressing questions of the day – but you are to blame for inviting a political philosopher to speak to you, rather than a journalist. I would like rather to discuss some questions that pertain to the nature of democracy itself, and to ask whether even today America is “democratic” in certain important respects. I am fearful that it may becoming less democratic every passing day – as I understand that word – which is why I suggest that a question mark is needed at the end of the title of my remarks, “The Future of Democracy in America?”

Let me begin at the beginning – with Aristotle, of course. In Book 6 of his great work, The Politics, we find the only time he describes the principle of democracy to be liberty, and provides two understandings of liberty by which democracies can be guided. The first way in which liberty can be manifested in democracy echoes Aristotle’s consistent definition of citizenship, which he describes numerous times in the Politics as “ruling and being ruled in turn.” By this definition, liberty is a form of self-rule, the sharing in rule by citizens in which one is ruled by laws that are self-made. This is a special definition of liberty, calling upon the widespread presence of virtues that are required by self-government, including moderation, prudence, and justice. To be “ruled and be ruled in turn” is also to live in understanding of Aristotle’s great and hard teaching, that “man is by nature a political animal,” that we are only fully human when we live in political communities in which we learn to govern our basest impulses and aspire to attain our human telos, our end, to the greatest extent possible. By this definition, democracy is the most idealistic regime of all, the one that aspires to the greatest possible extension of virtue to all citizens; but, by this same definition, it is also most demanding and perhaps least achievable, since it requires a special set of circumstances, above all a special kind of schooling in citizenship, that permit the widespread flourishing of the arts and practice of self-government.

The other way in which the principle of liberty manifests itself is what Aristotle describes as the ability “to live as one likes,” for, he notes that some democrats say that it is preferable “to be ruled by none, or if this is impossible, to be ruled and rule in turn.” Outwardly this form of liberty can look the same as the first version of democracy – for, it involves the appearance of ruling and being ruled in turn. But its principle of liberty is not based upon the embrace of self-rule, especially citizenship, as the essence of liberty, but instead the acceptance of the appearance of rule as a second-best option. Aristotle describes a situation in which, by this second understanding of liberty, our deepest desire is to “live as one likes,” which, for the ancients, is the very definition of tyranny. However, realizing that no one of us can achieve the condition of all-powerful tyrant, we agree instead to the second-best option of living under democratic forms. In such a condition, we outwardly exhibit the appearance of citizenship, but such democrats harbor a deeper desire to “live as one likes.” Such democrats have the souls of tyrants.

Aristotle’s distinction is worth keeping in mind, because today most democracies are liberal democracies, and thus, have the principle of liberty at their heart. However, liberal democracies are often content to fudge the difference between the two definitions, and often implicitly accept the second definition of liberty to be fundamental. America is a nation that is a perfect portrait of the tension between these two definitions. It was founded first by Puritans who articulated almost verbatim Aristotle’s first definition of liberty. This was the founding of America so admired by Alexis de Tocqueville during his visit to the United States in the early 1800’s, who in Chapter 2 of the first volume of Democracy in America quoted these lines from one of America’s earliest Puritan intellectuals, Cotton Mather:

I would not have you mistake your understanding of liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts, to do as they want. This liberty is inconsistent with authority and impatient of all restraint. This liberty is the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is another form of liberty, a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end of all authority. It is the liberty for that only which is just and good, and for this idea of liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives. (I.ii.42).

Tocqueville noted that this understanding of liberty informed the practices of the citizens in the townships of New England, even long after the dissolution of the closed and confining Puritan communities of the 1600s. By the time Tocqueville visited America, he witnessed this kind of liberty – the practice of “ruling and being ruled in turn” – in vibrant forms of local self-governance throughout New England. He wrote that what he saw there was an admirable combination of “the spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion,” one in which the spirit of liberty was moderated by the truth of our condition under God, and in which religion supported the practices of political liberty. Tocqueville admired especially the spirit of common good that pervaded the New England townships and the rich fabric of associations that populated civil society. He praised these forms of “local freedom” and especially the educative force of active civic engagement which, he wrote, drew people “from the midst of their individual interests, and from time to time, torn away from the sight of themselves.” Through what he called “the arts of association,” citizens were “brought closer to one another, despite the instincts that separate them, and brought them to aid each other.” He called the local townships and associations “the great schools” of democracy, inculcating a spirit of healthy democratic orientation toward a common good. Through civic life – that ancient practice of “ruling and being ruled in turn” – Tocqueville observed that democratic citizens “learn to submit their will to that of all the others and to subordinate their particular efforts to the common action." Through the activity of political life, he wrote, “the heart is enlarged.”

If America was founded according to a spirit of liberty that encouraged the practice of Aristotle’s first understanding of democracy, centered especially on the practice of self-government among citizens, America also had a subsequent Founding in which the second understanding of liberty dominated. This is the Founding that drew especially upon the understanding of the social contract philosophy of John Locke, and informs the core documents of the American government such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. According to Locke, by nature human beings are born free into a State of Nature in which law and government are absent. Our natural condition is one of complete freedom and lawlessness, and only in order to escape the “inconveniences” of the State of Nature do we form a contract and abridge our natural freedom. To live under government and law is a second-best option: the first best option would be for everyone else to abide by the terms of the social contract while I would be free to transgress against those terms. But, being informed by reason as well as constrained by law, we abide by the terms of the contract in spite of our inner desire to “live as we like.”

By this Lockeian understanding, government exists only to secure our rights and to advance our individual freedom. It does not seek to foster conditions in which our souls are educated in self-government, and thus Locke – following Hobbes – rejects the ancient idea that there is a summum bonum or a finis ultimus. We are authorized to define our own conception of the good (or to reject the idea of any such conception), and the role and purpose of government is to provide the conditions, as far as possible within the bounds of civil peace, that allow the full flourishing of individual freedom. Thus, while law is most fundamentally an unnatural imposition on our natural freedom, increasingly under such a government, the law will be increasingly oriented to expanding the sphere of personal liberty. Citizenship as a practice of self-rule is replaced by a definition of democracy dominated by a belief in personal freedom and autonomy. The only shared belief is that individual freedom should be expanded to the greatest extent possible, and government becomes charged with providing the conditions for that expansion.

Unsurprisingly, there is a tension if not outright contradiction between these two understandings of liberty. For the first, liberty to “live as one likes” is a contradiction to the idea of liberty in conformity with a conception of the human good. Its libertarian leanings, stressing the choices of individuals, proves destructive to the institutions and practices that are essential to an education in ordered liberty. The second understanding of liberty understands the first to be illiberal, based upon a conception of human good that confines the liberty of individuals to choose their own life-style. It demands liberation from the confines of restraining customs and laws, arguing that individuals should have the fullest freedom possible to chart their own life path. Yet, as contradictory as these two understandings of liberty are, they have both deeply informed the American self-understanding. They combined in a powerful coalition during the Cold War especially, presenting a common front against the collectivism and atheism of Communism, which they both opposed for different reasons. They have co-existed, if uneasily, for much of American history, perhaps in even salutary ways restraining the excesses of the one while correcting the other’s deficiencies. But, much evidence today suggests that they are undergoing a long-term divorce.

II. The Great Divorce

What Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America is the co-existence of these two forms of liberty, but predicts a slow but steady advance of the second understanding of liberty – “the live as one likes”- in place of the first, “ruling and being ruled in turn.” If he sees great evidence of civic practices in America of the 1830s, he also detects tendencies in democracy that will incline it, over the long term, toward an understanding of liberty in which people will seek to “live as they like.” He predicts the rise of individualism and the decline of civic engagement and mutual responsibility for the fate of fellow citizens, and, as a consequence, foresees the rise of a centralizing State that will take on many of the functions and duties that would once have been part of local practice. Many recent studies of American civic life seem to confirm Tocqueville’s prescient conclusions. Studies ranging from books such as Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart to more recent books on civic participation and American religion by Robert Putnam confirm that Americans have become more individualistic and self-oriented over time. At the same time, Americans have become less prone to be engaged in the activities of civic life and regard such activities to be interferences on their individual freedom. By one measure then, we are “more democratic” – more free to pursue our individual ends. By another measure, we are less democratic, less apt not only to participate in civic life, but less willing to entertain the idea of a common good and to moderate our self-interest in the spirit of common weal. There are fewer and fewer informal spaces in which the civic art of “ruling and being ruled in turn” can be trained and exercised. And, as Aristotle would observe, without practice, civic virtues will atrophy and weaken.

Tocqueville also warns Americans that they are self-deceived if they believe that democracy can survive if it defines itself in an increasingly exclusive way as “living as one likes.” Americans, he suggests, come to take for granted their inheritance of practices and institutions in which the civic arts can be learned and exercised. However, without consciously attending to their continuation, over time they will be weakened and abandoned in favor of individualism and “living as one likes.” Today we see growing evidence of weakening relationships and ties throughout American society, from bonds of community and neighborhood, to the ties of family life, to declining religious adherence. Many of those ties are today discarded or abandoned in the belief that they restrain individual freedom, but what is neglected is the way that their presence has been the necessary training ground on which the arts of civic self-rule were learned. Their abandonment – in the name of democratic freedom – today imperils democracy itself. In the name of individual freedom, we increasingly abandon the aspiration of self-rule.

For this reason, Americans must be confronted with a difficult question: is it possible that its victory in the Cold War over the great threat of Collectivism may yet prove to be a pyhrric victory, if it be the case only two decades later we see growing signs that American society is no longer capable of self-government? Was the health of liberal democracy over-stated in comparison to its vicious 20th-century ideological rivals, with its own inherent weaknesses today coming more fully into view? I believe the great challenges now facing the United States – economic, political, social and otherwise – are more than merely a passing crisis, but are manifestations of this deeper question whether a democracy based upon the ideal of “living as one likes” can survive. Evidence of the ruins of this belief are all around us. In our financial crisis we see the evidence of a set of behaviors in which greed and self-interest dominated a concern for the common weal. In our current debt crisis we see evidence of the way in which our obligations to future generations have been traded for today’s comforts. In our growing partisan divide we see the expression of raw interest that neglects our greater civic obligation to seek out the common good. In our high levels of divorce and the practices of serial monogamy, we see evidence of a self-serving definition of our most central relationships. In our massive over-consumption of resources we see evidence of selfishness that neglects the consequences of our actions upon the globe and upon future generations. I could go on.

III. The Parties Today

What would fascinate Tocqueville the most about America today is not only the evidence of the truth of his predictions, but how there persists at least a residue of the older understanding that democracy requires for us to “rule and be ruled in turn.” In our two political parties we see evidence of both definitions of democracy, the on-going presence of the internal contradiction that has been present in America from its earliest moments. In our Democratic Party – the party of President Obama – there are two simultaneous tendencies. There is, on the one hand, the belief that concerning lifestyle choices – especially regarding matters of human sexuality – there should be no limits upon personal and individual autonomy. This Party especially has become the party that defends nearly unlimited access to abortions, as well as advancing a re-definition of marriage away from its grounding upon the union of one-man – one woman. This Party denounces and even ridicules arguments about the need to promote the traditional values that sustain family life and a culture of modesty and self-restraint. At the same time, this Party also calls for restraints upon the Market, arguing that free markets encourage the vices of greed, produce indefensible forms of inequality, and lead to the degradation of the environment. In a speech given two years ago at Georgetown University, President Obama cited the gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verses 24-28, calling for America and the globe to build the economy not upon sand, but upon rock that could withstand the rains and floods. When it comes to economics and the environment, the Democratic Party cites the Bible to encourage an embrace of morality, but in personal choices of lifestyle, the Bible's admonitions are wholly rejected.

Alternatively, our Republican Party – which in recent elections took over the lower house of Congress – defends personal morality, particularly pertaining to family life and sexual matters. The Republican party has opposed the license to obtain abortions without limit, and has tirelessly sought limitations upon its practice. For this reason, for many decades many Catholics switched their historic allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, though their vote has recently tended to be closely divided. The Republican party has promoted policies that they argue support “family values,” including encouraging the support of traditional marriage, encouraging the formation and maintenance of families, and seeking policies that favor a moralization of society. At the same time, they have tirelessly defended an unfettered free market system that places greed, acquisitiveness and materialism at the heart of its endeavors, that encourages hedonism and the sexualization of our popular culture, and which has produced titanic levels of material inequality in our nation.

I think it is fair to say that at the heart of each of these parties is a self-contradiction, an incoherence at least in theory. However, I would argue, too, that this contradiction has tended to be resolved in practice in favor of that form of liberty that promotes a culture of “living as one likes.” While the Republican Party has been successful in promoting a free market system, they have not been very successful in their encouragement of their program in “family values.” And, while Democrats have been successful in advancing the cause of freedom in personal lifestyle choice, they have been less successful in advancing a moralization of the economic system. In each case, the “Lockeian” part of their agenda has undermined the “Aristotelian” part of their platform. And, in practice, the Republican promotion of unbridled free markets has led to the undermining of family stability, while the Democratic promotion of unbridled personal freedom has encouraged a broader hedonism that informs our economic lives. To “live as we like” increasingly undermines the institutions and practices that train us to “rule and be ruled in turn.”

On this point, I believe Poland can be of great assistance to the future of democracy in America and the world. For, at the end of the twentieth-century, it was leaders in the Solidarity movement and Pope John Paul II who articulated the argument that the true choice facing the world was not between collectivism, on the one hand, and radical individualism, on the other, but between a true and false understanding of the human anthropology – human nature. This is a false dichotomy that Americans have come to accept over the years, even though neither party fully accepts the terms of the debate. America remains imperfectly a nation of Lockeians, tending as the years pass to dissolve the institutions and practices that chasten the tendency to “live as one likes” and promote the practice of “ruling and being ruled in turn,” showing evidence of becoming more individualistic in our practice with each passing year. The future of democracy, in America and everywhere, depends on correcting this tendency toward a flawed definition of democracy, and re-learning the ancient art of “ruling and being ruled in turn.”

Upcoming

2011-04-06T06:55:00.003-05:00

On this Friday and Saturday I'll be in Rome, Georgia, at Berry College, along with a stellar lineup of scholars as part of Peter Lawler's and Marc Guerra's "Stuck With Virtue" Conference. Peter has posted information about the conference HERE. I'll be speaking on Friday evening, April 8 at 7 p.m. Ronald Bailey will be making the case for human "enhancement" and "transhumanism"; I will be defending humanity.

For DC-area readers and visitors, please put the fourth annual Rev. James V. Schall Award on your calendars. This wonderful event will take place on April 28 at 8 p.m. on the Georgetown campus - this year's recipient will be Msgr. Robert Sokolowski of Catholic University. Previous recipients include the late and great Ralph McInerny; Leon Kass; and George Carey. Information about this and other of our events is HERE.

Lovely Louisville

2011-04-06T06:44:00.002-05:00

I had a great time visiting the good people at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. The students were very bright, well-read, inquisitive and eager to discuss books ranging from Henry Adams's Education to the essays of Wendell Berry. During the afternoon of my visit I delivered the following lecture to a mixed group of undergraduates, U. of L. faculty and people from the community. The lecture seemed well-received and I fielded a number of good questions afterwards. That interaction (along with the lecture) was videotaped, and I was also interviewed for a "podcast" that may also soon be available on the McConnell Center website. My warm thanks to Gary Gregg, who was a gracious and affable host.

Here is the text of my lecture remarks - it ran to about 15 typed pages, so it's longer than your average post:

Knowledge of Ignorance:
What the Humanities can Teach the Sciences

For Delivery at the McConnell Center
University of Louisville
April 4, 2011

America might be called the technological republic—born, nurtured, and raised to its mighty stature by its close affiliation with the modern scientific project. Befitting its creation during the Age of Reason, America’s heroes have often been its inventors and scientists, from Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs. If other nations can claim great theoreticians—the Darwins and Mendels and Heisenbergs—the reputation of American science lies more in its applications. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “the more democratic, enlightened, and free a nation is, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer on their authors gain, fame, and even power.”

The United States was self-consciously founded as a polity based upon technical knowledge. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton attributed the proposed Constitution’s inspiration to “the new science of politics,” premised upon “reflection and choice” and no longer relying upon the unconscious accumulation of ancient practice, prejudice, and tradition, which he equated with “accident and force.” Reflecting this modern faith, the Constitution has been described as “the machine that would go of itself,” and the colonial physician Benjamin Rush characterized its citizenry as “republican machines.” There has been a close identification with the New Republic and the image of machinery; if America was, according to some, to be a “New Eden,” nevertheless – as Leo Marx recognized half a century ago – it introduced a “machine in the garden,” finding in the virgin land of the New World sufficient space and resources for the factories of industrialization.

The “new science” introduced by the Founders rested upon a distinctively modern conception of liberty, and the efforts of science, and its applications, were themselves to be the main underpinnings of the modern ideal of liberty. Drawing on the modern philosophies of Machiavelli, Hobbes and John Locke, the Founders rejected the model of the “ancient republics and principalities” that – as Madison concluded – had led to endless stasis and conflict in the small city-states of antiquity, and instead sought create the first application of the new theoretical science of politics. At the heart of this new theory was a rejection of the ancient idea that a main aim of the polity was the creation of the conditions for the education of the human soul in virtue. Rather, as Madison contended in Federalist 10, “moral and religious motives cannot be relied upon,” reflecting the decisively modern teaching that virtue was fundamentally unreliable, at the heart of the insecurity that pervaded the ancient regimes. Rather, Madison argued, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The role and place of self-interest fundamentally changes according to modern theory. According to the ancients, liberty was a condition of self-governance, both within the individual soul and the polity, resting the capacity of individuals and polities to live within self-imposed limits in accordance with human nature and humanity within nature. An education in and inculcation of virtue aimed at the abridgment of self-interest, and the small polity was seen as the appropriate sphere in which a moderate and self-governing populace could flourish. According to modern theory, liberty was to be understood as the absence of constraint. This modern conception of liberty required a political society that was large and diverse, allowing for the fullest possible range of human choices and experiences: as Madison stated, “the first object of government,” Madison wrote, “is the protection of the diversity in the faculties of men.” Self-interest becomes to be seen as the main wellspring of human motivation, and the great challenge for modern government becomes to channel and harness its potentially destructive manifestations into productive and useful ends. Through the twin solutions of modern representation and an enlarged sphere, Madison concludes that the citizenry’s self-interest will be re-oriented toward private ends and desires, channeled especially into commercial pursuits.

If ancient polities had been riven by the factions that had been the result of the failings of the training in virtue – the inescapability of self-interest – modern theory sought to reorient the hostility of man against man toward a new aim: the conquest of nature. According to modern theory, liberty was limited not essentially by our fellows, but by the constraints imposed by the natural order. Rather than seeking to live within naturally imposed limits, as was held by ancient theory – including limits of human nature itself – modern theory argued that natural limits must be overcome to the fullest possible extent. Peace and concord among humans could be achieved by the expanding power of humanity over the natural domain. Francis Bacon – the early employer of Thomas Hobbes, and one of the “trinity of men,” along with Newton and Locke, whom Jefferson regarded as the greatest men to have lived – argued that science must be reoriented away from a contemplation of the nature of things, and rather toward the effort to seek practical applications that would lead to the “relief of the human estate.” If the highest form of life according to ancient theory was the pursuit of knowledge in the form of philosophy, Bacon argued instead that “knowledge is power” – in particular, the power to expand human dominion over the natural order.

From the very outset, America was thus oriented toward the aim of progress, understood not only in material terms, but also in moral terms. One of the Constitution’s most ardent supporters, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, delivered his renowned “Lectures on Law” in 1790, and articulated a deeply American belief in progress that combined material and moral advance – long before the “Progressive” era:

“It is the glorious destiny of man to be always progressive….. The principles and the practice of the liberty are gaining ground, in more than one section of the world. Where liberty prevails, the arts and sciences lift up their heads and flourish. Where the arts and sciences flourish, political and moral improvement will likewise be made…. In every period of his existence, the law, which the divine wisdom approved for man, will not only be fitted to the contemporary degree, but will be calculated to produce, in the future, a still higher degree of perfection.”

It is perhaps fair to say that we all have been shaped to a significant degree by the vision of the Framers and the modern conception of liberty that has placed the advancement of science and technology as its main engine. We live in a world pervaded by the practical implements of our scientific advances, from the longer and healthier lives we lead, to the transportation system that allows swift movement of people to any part of the globe, to that still evolving new form of information and communication, the internet. Our universities have become dominated by the aim of advancing “research,” an activity that takes its cue from, and reinforces the preeminent role of, the natural sciences. And, a parade of modern Presidents – perhaps none more so than President Obama – have urged young Americans to take up the pursuit and study of science or its associated applied - “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” or STEM.

************************************************************

In short, what I have laid out is a very brief summary of America’s “official” political philosophy, one that has been captured in its founding documents and deeply ingrained into its basic worldview and orientation. We are all “progressives,” in a sense: can one imagine a political candidate standing before the electorate arguing against progress or growth or an optimistic vision of America’s future greatness?

Yet, from the very outset there was another set of voices who warned against the dangers of the modern understanding of liberty, drawing in substantial part from the ancient ideal of liberty and its emphasis upon limits, nature and virtue. According to ancient theory, the belief that liberty consisted in the limitless pursuit of the goods of the world was in fact nothing other than a form of slavery, the enslavement of the soul to the appetites, or the basest part of our nature. Such a pursuit was suitable to the tyrant – or the tyrannical part of our soul – but not to a free people. Early critics of the Constitution – the so-called “Antifederalists” – argued that the Constitution was inattentive to the needs and demands of virtue required among a republican citizenry, and feared that the new system would incline the citizenry toward privatism and an orientation toward commerce that would undermine the necessary virtues of a free citizenry. Echoing the ancient teachings, they urged that the republic should retain a strong support for local practices of self-governance. They emphasized the need to recognize the existence of cultural distinctiveness throughout the States, fearing that increasingly national legislation and identification would eviscerate local practices and customs that rested on a close connection with local natural conditions.

The dark side of the scientific orientation of this project was also recognized. In America’s “official” philosophy the self-confidence and optimism of the prospects for the conquest of nature remained strong and dominant. One need only consider the writings of an author considered by many to be America’s leading and greatest philosopher, John Dewey (whose views substantially dominate pedagogical theory in our schools of education. In his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, written in 1920, he begins by acknowledging his debt to Francis Bacon, whom he regarded as “the forerunner of the spirit of modern life,” the “real founder of modern thought.” Echoing Bacon, Dewey wrote that the aim of science was “to force the apparent facts of nature into forms different than those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.” If liberals today object to torture as an inhumane practice, one of its leading lights earlier in the last century regarded the image of torture to be the appropriate metaphor for humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Given the dominance of the belief in science, technology, progress, and the modern conception of liberty in America’s “official” philosophic tradition, one might conclude that there is a scant tradition that opposed this dominant view. One would be hard pressed to discover a coherent oppositional tradition in America, particularly if one limited oneself to officially recognized philosophical texts. That would be to overlook the true locus of the main voices of this “opposition,” which tended to persuade an increasingly democratic and egalitarian public not from the halls of academe, but in the stories and novels consumed by a literate and reading public. The literary venue of this more ancient tradition represents a fundamental continuity with the ancient understanding of the nature of that teaching itself, which tended to emphasize less that virtue and limits could be taught and reinforced through appeal to philosophical arguments, but rather rested extensively on stories and storytelling. As Alasdair MacIntyre has written in After Virtue, in classical cultures, “the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories.” Beginning not with the anthropological assumption of the radically autonomous individual – the assumption that informs liberal theory and underlies the modern theory of liberty – ancient theory emphasized the fact of human interconnection, insufficiency, need and limits. Stories were and remain the medium of this teaching, drawing readers out of their own minds and circumstances to inhabit imaginative worlds that can be more real than their own.

One finds throughout America’s literary tradition strenuous warnings about the belief that science and technology will set humanity free. One might begin with that great inheritor of Ameirca’s first tradition, its Puritan inheritance, who early in America’s history saw its deepest and most troubling tendencies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, in particular, contain a consistent theme in which the ancient temptation of hubris is recast in the efforts of men of science to transform the people whom they love. No other story better exemplifies this temptation than Hawthorne’s great cautionary tale, “The Birthmark.” The story tells of a man of science, Aylmer, and his young and beautiful wife, Georgina. Aylmer, we are told, is the type of scientist whose “love of science” might rival “the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy.” Like many of that zealous believers in the power of science, he pursued “the secret of creative force … [to] make new worlds for himself,” and thus the narrator suggests that he possessed a “degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature.” Only by combining his love of science and his love of his young wife could he be satisfied.

That combination comes to pass in his casual observation one day that he could remove the one blemish from his beautiful wife, a birthmark upon her cheek. Husband and wife become increasingly unhappy about the imperfection that had once been described as a “charm,” and Georgiana eventually succumbs to Aylmer’s request to remove it through scientific intervention. Their relationship grows more untrusting and distant as Aylmer’s love of the idea of perfection crowds out his love for his actual wife. The story culminates with Georgina agreeing to consume an elixir that succeeds in removing the birthmark, but also kills her in the process. In her dying words she absolves him, telling him that he “rejected the best the earth could offer…”

This story was the subject of the first meeting of President Bush’s Bioethics Commission chaired by the philosopher Leon Kass, and at that meeting, it was a medical doctor, William May, who observed that the story showed the modern tendency toward a kind of Gnostic hatred of the given world. In a penetrating analysis, he argued that science partakes of two kinds of love that can be compared to parental love, and warned of the dangers of tending too far in the desire of transformative love over accepting love:

Parenting entails a double passion and loyalty -- both to the being and to the well-being of the child. Neither loyalty is complete alone. On the one hand, parents need to accept the child as he is. As Frost said, home is where when you go there, they have to take you in. Parenting requires accepting love. On the other hand, parents must also encourage the well being of the child. They must promote the child's excellence. If they merely accept the child as she is, they neglect the important business of her full growth and flourishing. Parenting requires transforming love.
Attachment becomes too quietistic if it slackens into mere acceptance of the child as he is. Love must will the well-being and not merely the being of the other. But attachment lapses into a Gnostic revulsion against the world, if, in the name of well-being, it recoils from the child as it is.
Ambitious parents, especially in a meritarian society tend one-sidedly to emphasize the parental role of transforming love. We fiercely demand performance, accomplishments, and results. Sometimes, we behave like the ancient Gnostics who despised the given world, who wrote off the very birth of the world as a catastrophe. We increasingly define and seize upon our children as products to be perfected, flaws to be overcome. And to that degree, we implicitly define ourselves as flawed manufacturers. Implicit in the rejection of the child is self-rejection. We view ourselves as flawed manufacturers rather than imperfect recipients of a gift.
Parents find it difficult to maintain an equilibrium between the two sides of love. Accepting love, without transforming love, slides into indulgence and finally neglect. Transforming love, without accepting love, badgers and finally rejects.
It may not overreach to observe that modern science exhibits the two sides of love suggested here. On the one hand, science engages us in beholding; it lets us study and savor the world as it is. On the other hand, science and the technologies it generates engage us in moulding, in the project of transforming, amending, and perfecting the given world.

We can find further warnings about the dangers of the embrace of science and its attendant modern technologies even in the works of authors themselves who were swept up in the technological and progressive craze of the late-nineteenth century. As Mark Twain achieved success as an author, he invested much of his wealth in various experimental technologies that he believed might hold the key to modern convenience and not a small sum of profit for his efforts. Yet, for all his technophilia, in 1889 Twain published the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a rollicking tale involving the time travel of a young employee of Hartford’s Colt arms factory back to the Middle Ages of Arthurian England. Much of the novel features the comical send-up of the backwardness, gullibility, and ignorance of the Medieval court and peasantry, with the lead character – Hank Morgan – eventually establishing a 19th-century advanced society in the midst of the Arthurian age with the assistance of capable young men he has educated and molded. Still, at the book’s conclusion it is the very 19th-century technology – and particularly its weaponry – that lead to the demise of Hank and the young men, when, attacked by some 30,000 knights of Christendom, they decimate the host with electricity and Gatling guns. Trapped by a wall of rotting corpses, the modernists succumb to disease and the transplanted industrial revolution comes to a quick demise. While the vast majority of Twain’s tale mocks and ridicules the ignorance and foibles of the Middle Ages, its ending provokes the disquieting suspicion that all along, faith in modern science and technology obscures from its true believers its greater capacity to destroy, perhaps above all by overlooking the more ancient admonitions that would force us to recognize our propensity to sin and self-aggrandizement. Twain would seem finally to invite us to consider that material progress does not imply moral progress.

It is in that genre that Twain’s book in some ways inaugurated – science fiction – that one finds many of the cautionary tales about the human tendency to overestimate the power of science to solve human problems, and even the ways it exacerbates some of our worst failings. In more modern times, there has been no author in the genre of science fiction who better explored this theme than the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Most of his novels touch on this theme – for instance, Breakfast of Champions recalls his presence in Dresden during the horrific Allied fire-bombing of that city, a scene that recalls the conclusion of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and explains some of the reasons why Vonnegut modeled so much of his personal style on Twain’s – and a host of other of Vonnegut’s novels explore related themes of the dangers of science, technology and humanity’s sometimes dehumanizing faith in progress, from Cat’s Cradle to Galapagos to so many of the wonderful stories in his collection Welcome to the Monkey House. But the novel of which I remain most fond is his first, Player Piano, that tells of a future in which humankind has effectively eliminated meaningful work in the name of efficiency, profit, cost and leisure, rendering most of the population as nothing other than wards of the State, overseen by a small number of highly-educated and credentialed managerial elites whose job consists in being “symbolic-analysts.” A visiting dignitary from the imaginary land of Bratpuhr observes the degraded and meaningless “make-work” labor of most of the American population, and tells the Secretary of State who is serving as his guide that in his country, too, they have many people who work as slaves – takaru, in his language. When told by the Secretary of State that these people are not slaves, but that they are citizens, the Shah gazes reflectively into the distance as if gaining a sudden understanding, then repeats as a mantra – “takaru – citizen… citizen – takaru….” Vonnegut’s book raises the question of whether there is not, in fact, something inherently noble in playing a piano with one’s own two hands – even if imperfectly, and when machines can do a perfectly adequate job in place of humans – and, by extension, whether there is a dignity to work that goes beyond measures of efficiency and profit.

If Vonnegut’s book implicitly asks what are people for?, this is the literal title of a book, and a major theme, in the writings of Kentucky’s finest writer and, I would argue, the best and most important living author in America today, Wendell Berry. Berry’s poems, stories, novels and essays present a coherent and powerful argument against most of the assumed prejudices of our day, particularly those regarding the central desiderata of science, technology, industrialism, globalization and the Gnostic impulse toward “perfectibility.” Among other of Berry’s targets of critique – which include our basic economic presuppositions, the industrial method that tends toward monoculture, our reliance upon warfare as a source of moral meaning, and the widespread dismissal of “country people” as the very essence of parochialism and backwardness – is centrally the modern university. Perhaps no other institution in modern America is more responsible for advancing the vision of a society dominated by the scientistic mindset. Universities today exist, he argues, largely to strip mine human capital from their localities, transform them into a usable commodity, and place them into the flow of international commerce where they can act irresponsibly as “itinerant vandals” while leaving in their wake the devastation and plunder of local communities. Thus displacing people from the people and places to which they might bear a responsibility, they are free to see the world as necessarily requiring the transformation of science and technology.

Berry points alternatively to the literary tradition that had at its core “the continually recurring affirmation of nature as the final judge, law giver, and pattern maker for the human use of the earth. We can trace the lineage of this thought in the West through the writings of Virgil, Spencer, Shakespeare, Pope, …” – and, of course, Wendell Berry himself. “The idea,” Berry writes, “is variously stated: we should not work until we have seen where we are; we should honor Nature not only as our mother or grandmother, but as our teacher and judge; we should ‘let the forest judge’; we should ‘consult the Genius of the Place’; we should make farming fit the farm; we should carry over into the cultivated field the diversity and coherence of the native forest or prairie. And this way of thinking is surely allied to that of the medieval scholars and architects who saw the building of a cathedral as a symbol or analogue of the creation of the world.”

Berry has been in the forefront in the criticism of efforts by modern universities – perhaps especially those in Kentucky, which he thinks ought to know better – to embrace the STEM agenda (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). He understands this agenda to be the necessary and inevitable course of an industrial economy that generates ever more clearly the unsustainability of its own activity. Noting that the industrial method aims at use of any resource until it is exhausted, he writes that “it is for this reason that the industrial economy has been accompanied by an ever-increasing hurry of research and exploration, the motive of which is not ‘free enterprise’ or ‘the spirit of free inquiry,’ as industrial scientists and apologists would have us believe, but the desperation that naturally and logically accompanies gluttony.” Berry has instead argued that the university’s primary mission and focus should be the cultivation of human beings - not “just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs of human culture.” They should educate humans to live in places with a view to the preservation of those places and ways of life for a long time, beyond their own life span and those of their children and their children’s children. Of today’s graduates of our leading institutions of higher learning, he asks the questions: “Do they return home with their knowledge to enhance and protect their neighborhoods? Do they join the ‘upwardly mobile’ professional force now exploiting and destroying local communities, both human and natural, all over the country? Has the work of the university, over the last generation, increased or decreased literacy and knowledge of the classics?”

As Berry points out, and these other literary examples testify, for a long time in American history there was an alternative tradition of self-understanding – and of liberty – that existed uneasily but persistently alongside the “official” American belief that liberty consisted in the conquest of nature. This tradition was maintained most centrally in the great literary tradition of the West and America, and found its greatest expression in the classical liberal arts education that most students were expected to master in order to be considered an educated human being. This tradition of “liberal arts” – by its own self-description, centrally an education in the art of being free – moderated and even from time to time restrained the dominant impulse to define and pursue freedom through the scientific overcoming of obstacles.

It is a long story to describe how this tradition was eventually weakened, undermined, and finally all-but routed. Today a coherent education in the liberal arts is hardly to be found in institutions of higher learning, and the humanities more broadly are under deep threat of evisceration. At institutions across the land, a growing chorus of voices (all the way up to the White House) insist upon the central need for education in STEM, either implicitly or explicitly at the expense of even a modest – much less sustained and coherent – exposure to the liberal arts. America today stands at a new and terrifying precipice in which it threatens to all but abandon its commitment to its “second voice,” that “alternative tradition” found especially in its literary tradition that has been a corrective and moderating influence from its very inception. In the wake of a financial crisis in which the masters of financial technique pursued ends inherent to that technique – increase of profit and utility – we have seen the further destruction of communities and the ability of people to live in homes. The masters of those techniques were the graduates of our leading institutions, yet – to my knowledge – not one has concluded that higher education has gone awry, and that the problem cannot be fixed by the application of better techniques, regulations, and applications. The question of the proper and appropriate nature of freedom and self-government, and the necessary kind of character to achieve both, continues to remain off the table.

I predict we will again learn to value the literary tradition that has always taught us that the human dream of dominion and perfection is simply raw and self-destroying hubris. I fear that this revaluation will only come after a time of terrible suffering that will bring into reality the imaginary scenarios feared by the likes of Hawthorne, Vonnegut, Twain and Berry. I hope that we will be wiser than to invite that eventuality, and am encouraged that we have the literary voices and tradition that can help us correct our course. Whether we have the wisdom and the foresight remains to be seen.

The New Lisbon?

2011-03-17T11:53:00.005-05:00

In the wake of a series of catastrophes in the course of recent years - the financial crisis and the Great Recession; the Gulf oil "spill" as well as a series of mining accidents; and, most recently, the horrifying spectacle of imminent nuclear disaster in Japan, following the devastation of a massive earthquake and tsunami - Harold Meyerson has written an important and essential column. Better put, he has written half of an important and essential column. In the column, he argues that the human belief in our mastery over events deserves deep and critical re-evaluation. But his conclusion - that there is a need for greater government control over our lives so that we can avoid the bad results of recent years - is, remarkably, a perfect example of the very impulse that he otherwise seeks to critique. Columnist, heal thyself.

Meyerson opens with a compelling reminder that it was a massive earthquake and tsunami that shook the West's faith in an all-powerful and benevolent God at the very beginning of the European Enlightenment. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was so deadly and destructive that it famously led Voltaire to write Candide, a biting satirical demolition of Leibniz's theodicy that "we live in the best of all possible worlds." The pre-modern faith in an all-powerful and ultimately benevolent God was widely displaced: instead, it came to be widely believed that humanity was on its own, and needed to gird itself for that reality.

Voltaire's critique, and subsequent developments in European enlightenment philosophy, politics and economics, ushered in the very world that Meyerson now asks us to reflect upon. The Enlightenment project was to foster the human capacity to govern a recalcitrant and often hostile world. Science, especially, as well as education, technology, and market economics was to usher in a period of permanent human progress. Subsequent French enlightenment authors like Condorcet and Comte predicted an ever-increasing mastery of the natural world and ultimately the improvement of the human moral condition itself, with Comte arguing that the aim should be the establishment of the "Kingdom of Heaven" on earth and the inauguration of a new religion - the religion of Humanity. In the United States, Progressive thinkers like Herbert Croly (who founded The New Republic), John Dewey and social gospel proponent Walter Rauschenbusch translated this thought into an American idiom, transforming American politics in a decisively nationalist and scientistic direction and re-making education and religion toward progressive ends and purposes. Dewey, in particular, argued that science and progressive education would make it possible for us to master the natural world, and compared the relationship of humanity to nature like that of an inquisitor to a victim who withholds its secrets, and that we are justified to use torture to extract the information that we need.

Some three-hundred years after the inauguration of this philosophical project, and perhaps no more than a century after its full launch "on the ground" - its instantiation - it would seem that there is significant gathering evidence that the "exclusive humanist" belief that humanity could exercise mastery over the world, and even ourselves, was ill-fated. Today the Right bemoans the destruction of a moral fabric that once governed the lives of individuals, families, communities; while the Left decries the human destruction of the "environment" - what used to be called "nature" - and calls for a re-evaluation of the utilitarian ethic that underlies our modern economic order. In effect, both the Right and Left alike are critics of a part of the modern Enlightenment project, but each are also sufficiently wed to its underlying aims to seek to retain one of its central mechanisms - whether the economic engine, on the Right, or the State, on the Left.

The Right argues that only the market can "know" the best course for humans, in spite of mounting evidence that the "market" tends to favor short-term solutions that "externalize" costs to future generations and that seeks efficiency and profit even at the cost of humane practices and traditions. A world organized around "The Market" promotes and fosters greed and materialism, and contributes mightily - indeed, requires - a utilitarian relationship to the natural world. The Left cautions against the immorality of the marketplace.

The Left, in turn, asks the State to correct and even at times to replace the Market as the best locus for decisions. Instead - aided by social science and a burgeoning number of studies - the Left views the State as sufficiently knowledgeable and neutral to provide just outcomes in the human effort to exercise mastery over the natural injustices of the world. It is believed (as Meyerson suggests) that the State can know with some certainty the effectiveness of its regulation and oversight of the market (and, at times, wisdom to decide when it at times replaces markets). The State is thus the best locus and agent of the modern Enlightenment project.

Yet, the Right rightly notes that the State never has sufficient information, and cannot claim to be truly neutral in its decisions (particularly in the context of an electoral system). The State will always imperfectly control and regulate what it claims to be able to control - and, as case in point, it is clear that in the instances suggested by Meyerson, that the government was unable to use and adequately apply even the regulatory structures it had at its disposal had in the case of the economy and off-shore oil drilling (not to mention that it was compromised by a host of interests that urged government to remain at bay. The Left errs in thinking that a fool-proof wall can be built between those interests and the government). The Right warns legitimately against bad and arbitrary government.

While Meyerson initially points us toward a reconsideration of the legacy and consequences of the Enlightenment's hubristic belief that humanity can gain the requisite knowledge and power to exert final mastery over nature - one that will eliminate all or most negative consequences resulting from that effort - he immediately departs from that conclusion by re-framing his proposal in the more narrow partisan terms we have grown accustomed to understanding the debate. The conclusion that actually follows from his analysis is not that the aim of mastery is better achieved by Government than Markets; rather, it ought to be that the aim of mastery was deeply flawed in the first instance.

Meyerson - and all those like him, who populate the elite institutions of the world - would do well to discover "the virtue of ignorance," and the attendant modesty and humility that this virtue demands in our interactions with each other and the world. The correct conclusion to be drawn from the mounting catastrophes - ones that we mistakenly tend to discount as "unintended consequences" - is that the costs of mastery are simply too high, and the aim was fallacious to begin with. The mounting deleterious consequences show us that mastery was never possible, and that nature does and will assert itself - if need be, by the ravages of our own excesses.

What's more, his column implicitly asks us to reconsider the Enlightenment's reaction to the Lisbon earthquake - and perhaps our own to the Japanese earthquake. Time and again, news descriptions of the Japanese reaction to the earthquake have been admiring portrayals of their "stoicism." While Anderson Cooper at CNN has attempted to frame the disaster's aftermath in his accustomed and tiresome mode of "blame the government" (after all, his career was launched by that mode following Katrina, so why stop now?), the Japanese population appears largely to understand that the world was not made fundamentally for our pleasure and dominion. The world is a difficult and challenging place to inhabit - and we do best not to rest our hopes on the mechanisms of conquest, but upon our mutually-supportive practices of how best to live well in that challenging world, and our on-going capacity to provide, comfort and remember, in communities organized for that central purpose.

Perhaps this earthquake will be our anti-Lisbon, giving birth to a new philosophy that may yet need several hundred years for its realization (in the absence of such a re-evaluation, our momentary fear of nuclear power, I fear, will quickly be overshadowed by our fear of a world that will require the use of less energy). That philosophy will be the anti-Enlightenment - one that will recommend not the acquisition of scientific knowledge for the end of human conquest of nature, but rather the cultivation of the "virtue of ignorance" toward the end of a more humble and deeper understanding of nature of which we are fundamentally and inescapably a part - and which, we are able to frankly acknowledge and accept, will kill us in the end. Perhaps, even, we will come think differently of the God that Voltaire mocked as incapable of creating a world completely hospitable to humanity, rather coming (again?) to understand ourselves merely as parts of a more comprehensive order that deserves our awe, our humble admiration, a form of piety, and ultimately our assent.

Return to Princeton

2011-03-07T08:34:00.001-05:00

I'll be lecturing this Thursday, March 10, on the campus of Princeton University. My lecture title is entirely non-controversial: "The Conservative Case Against the Constitution." All are welcome, and I believe it will be recorded and posted online by the program sponsoring the event, the indispensable James Madison Program.

Additional information is here.

Civility and Democracy

2011-03-02T09:43:00.006-05:00

In the wake of the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona, a chorus of voices – mainly, if not exclusively on the political Left – arose in denunciation of the decline of “civility” in contemporary political life. Somewhat incredibly, some of the more prominent voices on the political Right – such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin – denounced these calls for civility. There were efforts – often successful, in fact – to point out that the Left was just as likely to be uncivil in its words and deeds. Still, it’s a disturbing spectacle to see so-called conservatives defending incivility. It was Edmund Burke, after all - the founder of modern conservatism - who lamented the decline of chivalry in Revolutionary France. Still, in the main, there was at least a moment of circumspection and even conversation after the Tucson shootings about the role of civility in our political lives, though that moment seems largely to have passed with little more than cosmetic efforts to be less offensive (where they existed at all).

One should expect little deep thought about such a matter as “civility” in contemporary political and social life, but there seem to me to be fewer more important questions facing our society today. Yet, the fact is, for all the hue and cry about the dearth of civility in our lives and times, as a culture we are actually more deeply opposed to civility than might even be suspected by its passing proponents. Modern – especially liberal – society is designed largely to undermine civility. Rather than lament its dearth, we should understand more fundamentally the deeper systemic causes of its decline.

Completely absent in the passing fury over the decline of civility was even a momentary reflection on the etymological origin of the word. Like the related word “polite,” civility can be traced back to an ancient word for “city” – cives in Latin, polis in Greek. This is hardly an incidental or irrelevant relationship. The ancients understood that there was an intimate relationship between life in the city and the activity of civilization. The city was not fundamentally understood (as in its liberal conception) as a vehicle of mutual convenience aimed at the pursuit of maximum individual self-fulfillment. Rather, the city was the necessary sphere in which humans became fully human, in which the higher parts of their natures were cultivated through practice and habituation to become self-governing and, with the limits of our inescapable self-ness, to be oriented toward a concern for the common good. The ancients understood that such an orientation required a life-long and concerted effort to combat the human propensity toward self-centeredness, and that it could only be effected in relatively small societies in which the distance between my immediate good and the good of the community was not too vast. Politics, and political life, was thus a kind of schooling in self-governance and common weal, with the aim of political life being the cultivation of citizens, not the encouragement of individual and self-defined goods.

In this context we can understand why “politeness” and “civility” are so closely connected to the ancient conception of politics. Manners – those expressions of civility and politeness – is a basic form of training in citizenship. By enacting a considerateness for others – even where this may not be actually our initial reaction – we become habituated into the practice of being other-regarding. Far from being punctilious and effected, manners are actually those earliest forms of training in civic life, the attendant “formalities” that make civic life more than simply a contrivance for self-interested individuals. They are also a kind of training in self-governance: for instance, table manners exist not to increase our capacity to consume more faster, but to slow us down, to allow us to ingest slowly, to reduce our consumption and at the same time to encourage the arts of conversation and companionship as the primary way we experience our most basic instinctual consumption (courtship customs, of course, afforded the same training in matters sexual).

First Hobbes and then Locke rejected this conception of politics as too confining for individuals. Instead (Locke particularly) commended a conception of politics as an arrangement of mutual convenience that was organized to allow for the individual pursuit of happiness. The cultivation of manners was rendered secondary to the training of people to become useful and productive members of society (“industrious and rational”), better to increase material growth and power that would in turn offer more opportunities for human liberation from natural constraints. Liberty became defined not as “self-government under laws self-imposed,” but as the greatest possible absence of restraint. Manners necessarily faded in importance – instead, liberal society favors “authenticity” and “self-expression” those watch-words of our individualism that excuse all manners of public and private offense.

A mannered society thus relies less on laws as the way we enforce social norms: a polite society needs fewer policies and police. A liberal society inevitably has more of the latter, less of the former. Ironically, a liberal society will come to rely on the enforcement mechanisms of the State as replacements of practices of civility. As Aristotle noted, the law-suit will replace civic friendship as a prevailing norm. Politics itself will come to be understood – in the famous words of Harold Laswell – “who gets what, when, and how.” For the ancients, the emphasis was on the the “who”; for moderns, the emphasis is on “gets.”

To hear contemporary liberals lament the decline of “civility” is thus more than a little galling. Modern liberals are the heirs of a longstanding effort to liberate people from the “little platoons” that tempered and educated individual self-expression. Hearing their decrial of contemporary “incivility” is a bit like the man who, after insisting on his wife dress as revealingly as possible, gets upset that other men are leering at her. By that same token, “conservative” defenses of “incivility” are even more aggravating, perhaps even more than the well-publicized “conservative” re-introduction of polystyrene coffee cups in the House cafeterias.

Civility is indeed a lost art of our time, but not because of talk radio or growing partisanship. These are symptoms of a deeper disease. Until we frankly diagnose our condition, we remain a patient whose diseases continue to metastasize, all the while complaining that what really bothers us is a hang-nail.

In the Shadow of the Blue Ridge

2011-02-14T11:10:00.001-05:00

I'll be speaking on Friday at Virginia Tech. My title is "Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Dream," and I'll be focusing in particular on those passages in Tocqueville about American restlessness (particularly the American disinclination to stay put). And yet, when people speak of "The American Dream," they often evoke a vague image of owning a house surrounded by a white picket fence in a wholesome home town. What is it we actually dream about?

“Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Dream” will take place at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the War Memorial Hall 124 (GYM 124) at 11:10 a.m. Go here for more info. And thanks to the good people at I.S.I. for their sponsorship.

Tell Us Something We Don't Know

2011-02-09T14:15:00.003-05:00

Wiki Leaks is slipping. In a case of stating the obvious, their latest "disclosure" shows the U.S. Government having reached the conclusion that the Saudi's have been significantly overstating the amount of their oil "reserves," and that we can expect a shortfall of promised deliveries within a year. Why would they do such a thing? Could it have to do with their certain knowledge that the revelation of their dramatically falling production rates would cause a spike in oil prices, at once causing the world to spiral into a deeper recession while also providing a (late, even belated) effort to develop "alternatives"?

Charmingly, the Yahoo news doesn't have a clue. They suggest that the upshot of this disclosure reveals that the Saudis will face "peak oil," missing the point that as go the Saudi's, so goes the world. And, "Yahoo" draws the conclusion that this will be bad news for SUV drivers. Not to mention industrial civilization.

Yea, this is really news, at least for those who haven't been paying attention...

To our young people - this is as good a time as any to revisit Wendell Berry's prescient and sage advice to the graduates of Bellarmine University in May, 2007:

What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.

Brave 'Net World

2011-02-09T09:13:00.001-05:00

Amid the widespread elation over the role of the internet - including and especially Facebook and Twitter - in helping to foment the popular uprising in Egypt against the longstanding autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarek, the New York Times ran this bracing review of a new book questioning the internet's inherent democratic qualities. Reviewing Evgeny Morozov's book The Net Delusion, technologist Lee Siegel rightly notes that, while the internet's democratic bonafides are still in question, the internet has shown itself to be unquestionably useful in information-gathering, an activity that ends up especially benefiting corporations and governments - i.e., those institutions that are increasingly organized to gather as much private information about people as possible.

Here's Siegel, who in this passage moves between the ways the internet supports both large corporations and centralizing governments:

Morozov urges the cyberutopians to open their eyes to the fact that the asocial pursuit of profit is what drives social media. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation.” In 2007, when he was at the State Department, Jared Cohen wrote with tragic wrongheadedness that “the Internet is a place where Iranian youth can . . . say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus.” Thanks to the exciting new technology, many of those freely texting Iranian youths are in prison or dead. Cohen himself now works for Google as the director of “Google Ideas.”

For Morozov, technology is a vacuum waiting to be filled with the strongest temperament. And the Internet, he maintains, is “a much more capricious technology” than radio or television. Neither radio nor TV has “keyword-based filtering,” which allows regimes to use URLs and text to identify and suppress dangerous Web sites, or, like marketers, to collect information on the people who visit them — a tactic Morozov sardonically calls the “customization of censorship.”

I keep hearing people speaking of the rise of social networking and connectivity as a new form of evolution. Their view echoes the millenarian hopes of Marshall McLuhan, who wrote at the dawning of the internet age of a new "pentacostalism" that would allow us to transcend the limits of individual consciousness: "The computer promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favour of a general cosmic consciousness."

Perhaps without realizing it, he echoed the utopian hopes of Richard M. Bucke, whose popular and influential 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness sought scientifically to prove humanity's evolutionary ascent to a condition of shared and universal consciousness. Arguing that we were on the cusp of a universal attainment of our final evolutionary step, Bucke's work faded into obscurity with the intervention of World War I and later, World War II and a series of savage and brutal wars and genocides that seemed, if anything, to suggest that Spengler was the better prophet of the age.

Still, the dream is not easily abandoned, and we are well-advised to remind ourselves of the pitfalls accompanying our fantasies. Above all, the prism of progress too often allows us to dismiss as superfluous or unimportant the brutal truths that contradict the fantasy. It would seem Morozov's book, and Siegel's able review, is a helpful first corrective, reminding us that the oppressions and manipulations of the internet are not ancillary, but perhaps more central its current and future role than our techno-optimists are willing to admit.

(h/t, Cory Andrews)