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]]>But even this early, we have started to reach the edges of what that construction can do. The hardest controversies of the past decade have not been about whether the government may imprison a speaker. They have been about a university deciding whom to invite, a platform deciding what to amplify, a professional association deciding whom to expel, a community deciding whom to shun. The First Amendment has almost nothing to say about any of it. It restrains the state but remains silent on nearly every institution where the fight is happening.
Public universities occupy a particularly complex space in this landscape, acting as legal hybrids of civil society associations and state actors. Because they are government-funded entities, they are formally bound by the First Amendment and cannot censor speech merely because it is offensive or controversial. Yet, as institutions of higher learning, they also function as distinct intellectual communities with their own academic standards, pedagogical missions, and codes of conduct. When public universities attempt to regulate campus discourse, they constantly stumble over this dual nature: treating themselves as private entities when convenient yet remaining fully subject to constitutional constraints that bar the state from policing viewpoints.
Into that institutional silence we have poured a great deal of improvisation: speech codes, content policies, bias-response teams, community guidelines, open letters demanding removal and counter-letters demanding reinstatement. Almost all of it is being invented from scratch, by people under deadline pressure, with no shared theory of what they are doing or why. The results have satisfied nobody.
Another legal tradition, though, confronted these questions a very long time ago and produced answers of surprising sophistication: the rabbinic sources. For readers unfamiliar with this legal corpus, the rabbinic tradition refers to the foundational legal and interpretive texts of classical Judaism, centrally including the Mishnah, the Talmud, and rabbinic codes, which were developed across late antiquity and the medieval era. I did not come to that tradition looking for guidance. For most of my experience as a lawyer and scholar of American free expression law, these rabbinic sources were, for me, family furniture: present yet unexamined. When I finally read them as a lawyer reads a code rather than as a descendant reads an inheritance, what struck me was not their piety; it was their engineering.
Begin with a problem that has no First Amendment analogue: what a community owes the argument that lost. American law protects a speaker’s right to make a losing argument. It has no view whatever on whether anyone should write it down. Once a question is settled by a court, a vote, or an editorial decision, the losing position drains away from the record. It survives, if at all, in a dissent that most people will never read.
The rabbinic tradition can teach us how to think about and use our free expression in ways that promote mutual respect and a shared pursuit of truth.
The rabbinic system took the opposite approach as a matter of formal structure rather than sentiment. Its foundational legal text, compiled in roughly the third century, records minority opinions alongside the rulings that defeated them. An early passage asks the obvious question—why preserve a view that is not the law?—and answers that a later court might need it. The reasoning is not generous; it is actuarial. The current majority might be wrong, and a tradition that discards its losing arguments has destroyed the only material from which a future correction could be built.
John Stuart Mill made a version of this argument in On Liberty in 1859, and it has been the philosophical backbone of Anglo-American free expression thinking ever since: suppress an opinion and you lose either the truth it contained or the chance to sharpen the truth against it. Mill was right, and he was roughly fifteen centuries late. He was also, crucially, writing philosophy.
The rabbis, however, were writing law. They did not argue that dissent ought to be preserved. They built a text in which dissent could not be avoided, where the losing opinion sits on the page beside the winning one, and no student can learn the rule without also learning the objection to it.
Consider what an equivalent commitment would look like in American institutional life. Not a right to speak, which we already have, but a duty to record, a norm under which a university that declines to invite a speaker documents the case for inviting her, a platform that removes a category of content preserves the argument that it should not have, a professional body that adopts a position files the dissent alongside it and keeps it there. We do a diluted version of this in judicial opinions and almost nowhere else. The older system treated it as structural.
The second problem is one American law has deliberately declined to solve: how to tell serious expression from performance. Our present doctrine evaluates speech almost entirely by content and consequence. Does it incite imminent lawless action? Is it defamatory? Is it obscene? These are questions about what was said and what followed. They are not questions about why the speaker said it, and the omission is intentional; American courts are rightly wary of anything that looks like an inquiry into motive, which invites the state to punish disfavored intentions.
That caution makes sense for courts but proves disastrous when institutions borrow it. A university applying a content test to speech ends up asking whether an idea is offensive, which is a question with no stable answer and no principled stopping point. A platform applying a consequence test ultimately asks whether a post caused harm, which collapses into whether anyone complained.
The rabbinic tradition, by contrast, asked a different question and asked it early. A much-cited passage distinguishes between disputes conducted l’shem shamayim—for the sake of heaven—and disputes that are not; only the first kind endures. The contrast it draws is not between civil speech and rude speech, or popular and unpopular, or comfortable and offensive. It is between argument aimed at getting the answer right and argument aimed at getting the arguer ahead. The paradigmatic bad-faith case in the tradition is a rebellion whose grievances may well have had merit; what condemned it was that its purpose was position rather than truth.
This is a harder test to apply than a content test, and that is the point. It is also the test most of us use in private. We can tell the difference between a colleague who challenges our work because he thinks it is wrong, and a colleague who challenges it because he wants our job. We know that the first is valuable even when he is mistaken and the second is worthless even when he is correct. We have not built any institution capable of saying so out loud, because the vocabulary we inherited, which emphasizes harm, offense, and safety, has no place to make that distinction.
The third problem is the one nobody has solved: what silencing costs, even when the silencing is legitimate. Here, the older tradition does something I have never seen an American source do. Its central story about interpretive authority concerns a rabbi who dissents from the majority on a technical question and is overruled despite, in the telling, producing miracles in his support and a voice from heaven endorsing his position. The majority holds firm on the ground that legal authority has passed to human deliberation and cannot be reclaimed by revelation. It is the tradition’s founding statement akin to democratic legitimacy, and it is celebrated as such.
But the passage does not end at the triumph. It goes on to record that the dissenter was excommunicated, that he wept, and that catastrophe followed: crops were ruined, dough was spoiled, whatever his gaze fell upon was consumed. The community was procedurally correct, yet the world was worse for it. The text declines to resolve the contradiction. It preserves both halves and leaves the reader holding them.
American institutional practice has no equivalent. When a university disinvites a speaker, or a publication severs ties with a contributor, the resulting statement is invariably a document of complete confidence. The decision was right; the process was sound; the values were upheld. Nobody writes, “This was within our authority, we believe we were correct, and we are aware that we may have destroyed something we cannot see.” That sentence is nearly unsayable in contemporary institutional English, and its absence is a large part of why these decisions inflame rather than settle.
The tradition I am describing is in some respects far more restrictive than American law, and the way it handles the collision is instructive. It maintains, for instance, a sweeping prohibition on damaging speech about others, binding even when the statement is true, extending to listening as well as speaking.
A functioning free expression culture requires more than a legal boundary against state power; it requires a moral architecture for how we engage with one another.
On its face, this is stricter than any campus code ever drafted. But the same body of law carves out a broad exception for speech that serves a constructive purpose, and the exception does the real work. Exposing a dishonest merchant is permitted. Reporting misconduct is permitted. Challenging a colleague’s flawed reasoning is permitted. The line is not drawn to prevent discomfort but rather to determine whether the speech accomplishes something beyond the damage it does. And the tradition is emphatic in the other direction, too: staying silent while harm proceeds is itself a violation. The duty runs both ways.
What contemporary institutions have absorbed is the prohibition without the exception. We have internalized the instinct that speech which wounds is presumptively wrong and lost the counterweight holding that speech which wounds in service of something real is presumptively required.
The same structure appears in how the tradition handles group solidarity. It holds, as a foundational principle, that members of the community are responsible for one another, and it pairs that principle with an affirmative obligation to rebuke a fellow member who is going wrong, qualified by a demand that the rebuke be delivered without contempt or public humiliation. Solidarity does not license silence. Dissent does not license cruelty. Both halves bind simultaneously, which is why nearly every institution under pressure chooses one, which is the easier option.
And on the oldest question of all—whether a just end excuses unjust means—the tradition’s central verse on the pursuit of justice repeats the word, a doubling that commentators have long read as a constraint rather than emphasis: justice must be pursued justly. Applied to expression, that is not a slogan against any faction’s tactics. It is a rule that cuts at everyone. If you suppress your opponents to advance a just cause, the cause has already been compromised by the method. This indicts campus shout-downs, state censorship, and economic pressure campaigns with equal force, which is precisely why no current political faction quotes it.
I am not proposing that American institutions adopt a religious legal system, and I am not claiming that this tradition is unique; other old bodies of law contain comparable machinery, and the case for looking at them is the same. My claim is narrower, and I think harder to dismiss. The rabbinic tradition can teach us how to think about and use our free expression in ways that promote mutual respect and a shared pursuit of truth.
We are trying to build governance for expression inside private institutions, in real time, with a doctrinal vocabulary developed for an entirely different purpose: restraining the state. That vocabulary gives us rights and prohibitions. It gives us almost nothing on obligation: no duty to preserve the losing argument, no test for distinguishing inquiry from positioning, no method for acknowledging that a defensible decision may still have cost something irreplaceable. Those are the exact questions our institutions keep failing to address. They are questions other legal traditions have worked on for centuries, while ours have not yet been written.
A functioning free expression culture requires more than a legal boundary against state power; it requires a moral architecture for how we engage with one another. It would be strange, and a little arrogant, to keep improvising our way through this crisis without at least reading what the older drafts said, not just to fix our institutions, but to recognize the obligations we owe to each other.
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]]>I’ve argued elsewhere that “beautiful losers” are people who don’t care about recognition or “victory” in the culture wars. Instead, they’re active, with others, in intrinsically worthwhile pursuits, rejuvenating culture by actually doing things, not just talking about them. They’re certainly not yelling on social media about the way the pursuits have been corrupted, or loudly informing the world that they are the only ones who have things right.
Still, this vision of life has a downside. In attempting to live well and do good where we are, we may begin to feel some self-doubt. Are our private activities really so meaningful? If nobody is talking about us, do we matter? More importantly, do other people share our views about the most important things? If they do, we would be unlikely to know it because they’re all so busy doing their own work and averse to self-advertisement. Esse quam videri: they’re doing the being, not the seeming.
Perhaps at times, though, a little publicity can be beneficial. Sometimes shining a light on good things is precisely what’s needed to remind us, or show us for the first time, that others share our views about meaningful activity. Surprisingly, even negative publicity can have good effects. When the activist Chris Rufo took issue with some comments I made in these pages last spring, a number of people contacted me to offer consolation, fearing that his attacks on me (and others like me) had been hurtful.
Actually, so far from being hurtful, the dust-up with Rufo has had multiple, unexpected good effects. Most importantly, it has connected me with even more people who share my views, who see what I’m trying to argue, and who are themselves resisting the coarsening of public culture by building alternatives to it. I was introduced to many people I hadn’t known before, co-laborers who are working to rejuvenate culture by opting out of the shouting and anger. These educators, parents, and writers are cultivating the receptive, appreciative, temperate, and supposedly “boring” virtues that liberal education affords.
One of the most remarkable of these efforts is taking place in the cities of Austin and San Antonio. I live in Waco, just two hours north of Austin on I-35, but until a few weeks ago I had absolutely no idea what was happening at a thriving group of classical charter schools called the Valor Schools. The world of classical schools is large, diverse, and growing, and there’s much to praise in the movement as a whole. But even among classical schools, Valor is at once stunningly forward-thinking and deeply conservative in its approach to educating K-12 children.
At the beginning of the summer, Valor’s president, David Williams, asked me to be the keynote speaker for the 2026 convocation in late July. I had no idea what I was in for. I was grateful to be invited, but I really didn’t know much, or anything, about the schools. It turns out that there are five campuses, presently enrolling five thousand students, with a waitlist of thousands more. Valor employs more than five hundred faculty and staff.
Williams had asked me to talk about the place of liberal education in our uncivil age. I wrote my talk a few weeks before the event, taking up an idea that I’ve already considered here, in Law & Liberty: the warrior disposition versus a disposition of receptivity, appreciation, and conservation that is essential for liberal learning and, for that matter, for a fulfilling life. I supposed I’d be telling them something new and different in using Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, and Gabriel Marcel to illustrate this disposition.
Then, just to get the flavor of the school, I began to listen to talks given by its leaders. I realized that I had been wrong—very wrong—in imagining that “my” vision would be at all new to them. Instead of introducing the Valor community to some unknown set of concepts, I felt as if I were returning to a family, or to old friends, who had been steeped in the very same books and ideas that had formed me, too.
In a talk from earlier this year, David Williams—Dave, as he is known to faculty and staff alike—observed that the Logos, with all its Greek and Christian resonances, has been corrupted in modernity. Drawing on Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt, he described the ideological disasters of the twentieth century as “revolutions against the Logos.” Twenty-first-century public culture is likewise full of distortions on both left and right, questionable claims and outright lies that are foisted upon the public by agenda-driven influencers and pundits. As George Orwell and Josef Pieper famously observed, the abuse of language is widespread, and in our age, longstanding.
We need confidence and humility in diagnosing the disorders of the age, plus a rightly ordered will to resist them with energy.
Pieper, Dave noted, saw the distortions of language for the vices that they are: “back-biting, tale-bearing, derision”—all things that we moderns often don’t even consider vicious (though Aquinas thought they were mortal sins). These distortions advance pet projects and political causes, and now form part of ordinary public discourse, neither unusual nor unexpected. But they encourage dishonesty, rudeness, and often, anger and hatred. People enthusiastically destroy the reputations of others, deplatform them, and deprive their “enemies” of jobs and status. Truth is subservient to political success. Equanimity and moderation are nowhere to be found.
Because media outlets like YouTube and X are omnipresent and powerful, Dave observed, we’re seeing an abdication of the educator’s authority to people who don’t possess the intellectual virtues of deliberation and judgment. Many influencers and podcasters are manifestly not wise, though they may well be crafty and financially savvy. Their aims are monetizing influence, gaining followers, and refashioning culture. They care little—or not at all—about making true and responsible statements about reality, yet they have an outsize influence on our children. This corruption of speech reflects a corruption of intellect, which can damage or even destroy individuals and communities.
So far, so depressing, a reader might think.
Dave then offered two possible responses to this crisis: first, despair, which he candidly admitted isn’t irrational. What can a single person do, he wondered aloud, to stand against an entire culture, to resist the self-appointed thought-leaders who have millions of followers? Teachers have only twenty-five students in their classrooms, and only a few hours a day to influence them. Or, he proposed after a pause, and with a slight smile, perhaps there’s heroism.
What would such heroism look like? It emphatically isn’t a pitched battle on social media, with scorn, vitriol, and loud declarations against enemies. It must be a wholly different kind of enterprise, a fight that is not really a fight at all. The heroism and valor required to resist disorder are inspired by the likes of John Paul II, Eric Voegelin, and Aquinas (and Maritain, Gilson, Giussani, Marcel, Lewis, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, and on and on). It is therefore an almost contemplative heroism: teachers show students the joys of the intellectual life and demonstrate devotion to truth in their own lives.
As an exhortation to his audience of staff and faculty, Dave quoted a famous line from Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: “The spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life,” Voegelin wrote. “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.”
And here is the charge of the Valor Schools, contra mundum: refuse to subordinate the Logos to power and ideology. Have faith in the tradition of reason as it has been passed down over generations. Seek true, not comprehensive knowledge; pursue an intellectual life that looks beyond one’s own cherished opinions toward the whole of reality. Follow Aquinas, who always considers the best counter-arguments available; emulate John Stuart Mill, who advocates knowing an opponent’s side of a case as well as or better than one’s own.
We can’t be lazy or apathetic in these endeavors, but neither should we be overly proud of ourselves for doing something that is, frankly, so culturally important. At the heart of Valor’s philosophy of education is the importance of remaining receptive to the world around us, appreciative of unearned, inherited goods, and humble because we sense our own limitedness. We need confidence and humility in diagnosing the disorders of the age, plus a rightly ordered will to resist them with energy.
Although Valor may be restraining itself from power-and-ideology games, it isn’t building a bunker. It carries its mission outwards into the community through the Valor Institute. The Valor Institute “for Studies in Person and Community” exists alongside the schools, offering a full slate of lectures and retreats throughout the year for faculty and staff and for invited guests. Recent speakers have included contemporary literary and academic luminaries like Bill McClay and Dana Gioia, and Fr. Thomas Joseph White will speak there later this year.
The Institute offers Liberty-Fund style retreats in which participants read and discuss a book or set of readings in a small seminar, cultivating friendships as they do so. Peter Crawford, formerly the academic dean for the Institute of Catholic Liberal Education and founding headmaster of the St. Jerome Institute in Washington, DC, has recently joined Valor as its chief academic officer and provides valuable leadership both at the school and the Institute. In short, this parallel institution exists to make sure that ideas remain at the very heart of the enterprise. Though they don’t do it very much themselves, these good things are absolutely worth publicizing.
I left Valor after two whirlwind days of intense discussions with deeply learned and wholly unpretentious faculty and staff. I discovered during the course of my visit that I was invited precisely because of the controversy stirred up by my Law & Liberty podcast with James Patterson this past spring. I had come to their attention as a result of the social media controversy that followed that podcast, and because of the publicity that was generated by it—the very phenomenon that both Valor and I find so damaging in culture. Yet Providence works in mysterious ways, and perhaps I should thank my new friend, Chris Rufo, after all.
For what I saw at Valor was a confirmation of what I hoped was already true: that there is a large, mostly quiet group of people who are not culture warriors in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, they are fighting a different kind of battle—a battle without anger, without vitriol, and without hate and pride. They are engaging in that most important cultural work of educating our children—and themselves—in the fundamental civilizational virtues of receptiveness, wonder, appreciation, and yes, even love.
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]]>If you had asked me, I would have guessed the Hollywood version of the damnatio memoriae of the great man would continue so long as Boomers matter in entertainment. I’m not sure I was wrong, but there are now some exceptions. Back in 2024, the biopic Reagan came out, starring Dennis Quaid in a remarkably believable role. A pleasant movie, cradle-to-grave storytelling, with the only real merit that it conveys the major facts of Reagan’s life. Anyone aware of Reagan would begin to sense that he must have been a great man.
Now we have a significantly more ambitious movie, The Brink Of War, starring Jeff Daniels, focusing on the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik on October 11–12, 1986. Writer-producer-director Michael Russell Gunn has assembled a remarkable cast headed by Daniels, with Jarred Harris as Gorbachev, J. K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Shultz, and Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. Filmed in Iceland, the story benefits both from the atmosphere of reclusion at the frozen volcanic end of the world and the dramatic focus of the beautiful Höfði house where the discussions take place—politicians on the upper level, the CIA and KGB in the basement.
It will take a minute or two to get used to Daniels, an infamously liberal celebrity, as Reagan, but then you will buy it. His demeanor and voice are very much Reagan’s, and above all his characterization captures Reagan’s great combination of dignity and comedy. If anything, you will end up faulting Daniels for running away with the show. But this is unlikely—we have so few occasions to see Reagan onscreen that it’s a treat to get such a bravura performance.
The major surprise of the movie is how incredibly pro-Reagan it is. It is pro-American generally, and pro-American Cold War policy, but above all, it is pro-Reagan. The drama is meant to evoke in the audience a great familiarity with Reagan, based on the one hand on his jokes, of which we hear many, more, at any rate, than one would have expected from a tense Cold War arms reduction negotiation story, and, on the other, on Reagan’s private vulnerability, his health and his love for Nancy, who did not accompany him, but with whom he shares the burden in telephone conversations.
The vision of a leader of a democracy, a human being like you and me, a husband, is deepened dramatically and rhetorically to the level of principle and action. Reagan’s strangest side as a politician was his opposition to nuclear weapons and his ardent hope that they could all be somehow gotten rid of. In The Brink of War, this passionate attachment to America and to humanity in general is developed at some length, but as part of a political plan. Reagan’s humanitarianism is limited and guided by good sense. He’s no bleeding-heart liberal, of course—nor is he shy about defending the American principle of equal freedom or condemning Communist tyranny.
If this is an idealizing portrait, it has the merit of reminding us that wisdom counts more than most things—the all-American confidence is based on competence here. Reagan understood the fundamentals of the political situation and knew how to deal with people. He deals well with Gorbachev in the story, but also with his own staff. He’s every bit the chief executive officer, in charge of his experts as much as of his cabinet, as sure of his subjects as of his speeches.
This most rhetorical president knew he had to bypass rhetoric and prove by deed that America was stronger, more united, and more patient.
The Brink Of War is overdone in some ways—for example, the title and the dramatic insistence that the world was about to explode in a nuclear fireball in 1986. This is not true and it may cause the custodians of our national history—who ought to be the movie’s major audience—to take umbrage. But I hope it doesn’t, because the movie is largely true to events and a useful introduction to the late Cold War. To the extent to which liberties are taken, it is done to please the audience with thrills, and if it is not quite sober, the movie has the qualities of being patriotic and intelligent. When you see the movie, which you should, you will see the clever twists of the plot, which I won’t spoil. One cannot say these artistic touches are better than the history, but artists must be allowed some freedom.
The Brink of War may satisfy liberals, too, since it idealizes Gorbachev as much as Reagan: Liberals are the kinds of people who damned Reagan as a warmonger, as the movie reminds us, but gave Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. But this dramatic attitude has the great merit of comparing America and the Soviet Union at their best—it may remind us that it is best to judge political regimes by their leaders. Gorbachev is tough; he understands that his empire is in danger of collapse; he also understands that the failures of the Soviet system could come not only from its tyranny and corruption, but also from loss of confidence. So his toughness, which is in a way a put-on, is also a necessity of his political situation. American greatness really is a threat to him—it can discredit communism.
Reagan compares Americans and Soviets as follows: We’re all human beings who need protection and want to escape the threat of war, but we’re also different: The role played by religion in American life is played by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In this analysis, American victory comes as a consequence of the greater plausibility of Christianity to Progress. Lenin famously claimed that Communism was Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country, but this turned out not to be true: Soviets eventually had to choose between the tech and the tyranny—they chose the latter. Reagan, contrariwise, could rearm America and even dared to put forward the Strategic Defense Initiative, an anti-atomic shield. The ultimate implication is that religion is a better master of tech than the kind of ideologies derived from modern philosophy. So what seemed like a side issue in the negotiations—the human rights of religious people tyrannized by the Soviet Union—reveals the fundamental conflict.
The difficulty of this analysis is that Reagan needs Gorbachev, since he can only deal with the Communist Party—he needs a counterparty, politically—but must weaken him, ruin his reputation, since he intends to win the Cold War. The movie’s most daring attempt is to convey Reagan’s political strategy dramatically in this regard. The Strategic Defense Initiative is what scares Gorbachev, why he wanted to meet Reagan, and what Reagan can’t compromise on. However much the American elites were against Reagan, the solidity of his conviction and the confidence of the American people sufficed to make his position much stronger than Gorbachev’s. His best negotiating strategy was a failure of negotiation. This most rhetorical president knew he had to bypass rhetoric and prove by deed that America was stronger, more united, and more patient.
The movie brings out this very interesting problem, Soviet collectivism versus American individualism, in a strange way. According to his custom, Reagan appeals to what everyone will admit, or the principles of his adversary—he quotes the Russian proverb he so liked: Trust, but verify. A statement against ideology, against tyranny. A reminder of peasant skepticism—the glamour of Soviet evil may convince intellectuals who are all tyrants in training, but anyone with sense or cunning could see through it.
Reagan also tells the following Soviet joke, which was also a habit of his: A man waits in a long breadline until he gets so angry that he says, I’m leaving, I’m going to go kill Gorbachev. Everyone is shocked; then everyone is shocked again an hour later, when he returns, defeated: The queue for people waiting to kill Gorbachev is even longer than the breadline. There is no legitimacy—only fear. But Gorbachev has the ugly answer: He never did get shot, unlike Reagan.
The political correlative of this problem of the leader’s life is war. In order to win a world war America had not started, America invented a nuclear weapon that has since terrified so many, although it has not been used since 1945. Is peace among global powers even imaginable without it? Maybe the movie’s greatest merit—and the secret meaning of its title, The Brink Of War, recalling brinkmanship—is that it brings up at a rather high level these old questions that are new again, since America has a peer competitor in China that may be more threatening than even the Soviet Union was. Everything that seemed settled by Reagan has come unsettled. A generation later, America is again in great danger and again trying to rearm.
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]]>The post Abusing Aristotle appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>This the third and final essay in a symposium on the common good. You can read the first essay by John G. Grove here and the second essay by Rachel Lu’s essay here.
It is curious how “the common good,” when it bubbles into public discourse, always seems to be at the center of bitter controversy. One would expect that everyone would be in favor of “the common good,” or at worst that it would represent the kind of vaguely uplifting language that few find objectionable. Instead, it leads to rancor. That was certainly the case with the recent controversy involving public personalities at the Daily Wire, National Review, and other right-wing outlets.
Critics of the New Right suspect that its members are using the phrase “common good” as a sanctimonious smokescreen to avoid serious discussion of their real priorities and purpose. That suspicion, it seems to me, is largely correct. Though the New Right claims the mantle of Aristotle, its adherents rarely trouble to delve with any seriousness into the relevant texts, or to explain the key concepts with clarity.
The New Right would like to use state power to achieve certain limited goals to which it is inordinately attached; an ordinary cost-benefit analysis would likely not favor those goals; so it reaches for Aristotelian language to lend them the appearance of a transcendent purpose, one that moves beyond garden-variety policy analysis. It helps that most Americans have limited familiarity with the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition, and are in no position to argue back. Oddly, though, the New Right’s own arguments draw at the same time on concepts from classical liberalism—a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Despite the lofty language, the New Right’s position never transcends the logic of a textbook collective-action problem, dressed up as a civilizational crisis.
To see this, one must begin by looking at “the common good” as Aristotle and Aquinas discuss it. It will quickly become clear that the distinctively American common good is very much in tension with the New Right’s goals and ethos.
The Classical Tradition
The first thing to get clear is that common goods are pedestrian and ubiquitous. Wherever two or more persons are bound together in any way for any length of time, there is a common good among them: two strangers paired for a tee time who agree to a fair match share, for a few hours, a common good; students in a calculus class share, for a semester, the common good of learning calculus; residents on the same street share, more permanently, the common good of a safe and attractive neighborhood. There is nothing mysterious in this. Classically, a good is a goal, and social unities form precisely when persons share goals; a shared goal simply is a common good.
Because common goods are ubiquitous, one who invokes them, to avoid confusion, ought to specify the association which is in view—referring to the common good “of the competitors,” “of the calculus class,” “of the neighborhood,” and so on.
Both Orestes Brownson and Abraham Lincoln correctly saw that liberty—of associations especially, but of individuals too—is essential to the distinctively American conception of the common good.
One may then wonder on what grounds anyone can justifiably speak of “the” common good, as if there were only one. The answer is that, since a good is a goal, a goal that sits at the top of a hierarchy of goals acquires a special status, and so may reasonably be called “the” common good, without qualification. (Aristotle makes the same logical move in Metaphysics I: only the wisdom that sits atop a hierarchy of partial sciences may rightly be called wisdom without qualification.)
Classically, only three common goods have been taken to have this special status. First, on the assumption that God is the goal of each thing in the universe, God may be called “the” common good (see Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy). Second, if there is such a thing as a complete society, “political society,” its goal has eminence over the partial, subsidiary goals within it, and may be called “the” common good (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.1–2). Third, the common good of “the human family”—or, as the Judicious Hooker might put it, of “man relating to man inasmuch as he is man”—likewise enjoys preeminence, since it structurally stipulates the conditions on which any other common good can be successfully pursued. Thus, if law by definition must promote a common good, as Aquinas says, and there is a natural law, then the natural law promotes a common good too—this third one, of humankind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights may be read as an attempt to articulate it.
You probably haven’t noticed it, but we put all three of these common goods together in our Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation … indivisible” (the political common good); “under God” (the theological common good); “with liberty and justice for all” (the natural law common good). The Pledge even orders them classically: the natural law common good frames the political common good while subordinating it to the theological common good. (See St. Thomas Aquinas’s De Regno for the classic statement of this ordering.) If one wants to speak in this way—and traditionally this is how most ordinary Americans have wanted to speak—then one may construe a political community as in this way “under God” only if it recognizes a substantive right to religious liberty; robustly provides conditions for the free exercise of religion; keeps its laws concordant with the natural law; and, in its culture and laws, construes liberty as intended for the attainment of virtue in its citizens (not excluding intellectual virtue)—as in “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
America’s Common Good
Political actors who want to invoke the common good of American society, at least if they regard themselves as “conservatives,” would need to think and speak in something like this way. If they supposed that something else were “the” common good—say, what they took to be the desired outcome of their preferred industrial policy—then they would not be referring to the common good of American society. Recall that that good must sit atop a hierarchy of goods.
I say “the common good of American society” because another trait of goods is that they must be distinctive. Classically, Plato and Aristotle held that the good of a thing is idion, specific to that thing (see Republic I and Nic. Eth. I.7). So “the” common good of American society must be something specific to it. In our history and founding there is a distinctive way of conceiving the three common goods just discussed and their relation, and it is the task of a genuine conservative, in American society, to construe what these are, get their ordering right, and see how to restore and strengthen them today.
That one has a proper grasp of the idion is essential here, just as it is with those other, ubiquitous and pedestrian common goods. A businessman appointed president of a university, for instance, who tries to run it like a business, will fail, because he does not grasp the specific nature of a university as against a business—he is incompetent to direct it toward its specific common good. Captain Von Trapp was rightly lampooned for taking the common good of his family to be like the common good of a ship. This is why understandings of “the common good” drawn from classical civilization, or the writings of monarchists, or nineteenth-century continental disputes, cannot simply be transposed to an American context and held up as a standard.
Likewise, someone who denied that there was a distinctively American common good at all, on the grounds that the Founding was vitiated by a noxious and irredeemable individualism, would be incompetent to direct Americans toward one.
Orestes Brownson, in The American Republic, held that the distinctive American good—what he called America’s “vocation”—was to exhibit how freedom and order may fittingly be harmonized, which he considered a vocation baked into the very structure of our nation, given its origin in separate but united colonies. The Federalist system, he thought, was part of the “organic constitution” of our people even before the Constitutional Convention formalized it. Abraham Lincoln pithily expressed the same vision: “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Both Brownson and Lincoln correctly saw that liberty—of associations especially, but of individuals too—is essential to the distinctively American conception of the common good. It took a century for us to get clear that liberty did not include the freedom to buy and sell slaves, and another century to get clear that it did not include the freedom, in public life, not to associate with races one regarded as second-class. But that we were getting clear about the nature of a free society, with equal opportunity for all—this was incontestable. It was how we all spoke: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
It follows that if a putative conservative says something like, “It’s foolish to emphasize freedom today,” he is saying that it is foolish to emphasize the distinctively American common good today. His view may be that, practically and strategically, it is necessary to emphasize something else today, so that we might attain genuine freedom, or the conditions of freedom—and he might be correct about that. But whatever he’s up to, if he has forsworn talk of freedom, then he must also be regarded as having forsworn reference to the common good, in our context. Talk of “the common good” is no longer available to him. Our common good is indeed complex, and includes such things as a strong defense, a productive economy, the beauty of our land, and our natural resources, just as with other nations. But for us it includes freedom essentially.
The New Right’s “Common Good” Nostalgia
From this classical and American point of view, the post-liberal New Right should be understood as a coalition that has precisely abandoned the common good of American society. Its members either have not grasped it, do not believe it ever existed, have become disillusioned with it, have lost faith in it, or regard it as “libertarian ideology,” mere “superstructure,” obscuring the workings of economic interests.
How, then, do they invoke this term, “the common good”? The meaning of a term is in its function; its meaning for them must be construed from the circumstances in which they use it.
Talk of “the common good” today rightly elicits suspicion, because those most eager to invoke it are not talking about the distinctive American common good at all; what they call “the common good” are various partial goods, dressed up to look whole.
The members of this coalition can look conservative because they are nostalgic, and nostalgia looks like piety for the past. They pick out some state of the country in the past—the early years of the New Deal, or the “golden decades” (which were not actually very golden) following World War II—or, more precisely, they selectively pick out some good aspect of the country then: “government and labor worked together,” “we bought things made in America,” “men could support their families on one income from a stable factory job.” This good aspect they deem “the common good.” They stir up passions of anger and envy by pointing out that these “common goods” have vanished. They devise conspiracy stories about how malign actors (“the laptop class,” “the coastal elites”) have wreaked this damage through the selfish pursuit of their own interests. And then, since they have no effective policies for restoring these good things from the past, and since, as political actors, they lack the prudence to effect any lasting changes, they are constrained to make loyalty to themselves a proxy for “the common good”—since, after all, only they even speak about “the common good.” A strong dose of Schmittianism helps here too, because these people must be your friends if those others are your enemies.
Note that they invoke “the common good” only for those good things in the past capable of winning votes. Surely past decades of a balanced federal budget or minimal national debt were “golden decades,” but no one will vote for a candidate who proposes that government take the steps necessary to balance the budget. Likewise, the GOP’s historic pro-life plank was quickly tossed overboard with barely a murmur from “common good” conservatives.
But the question lingers—why do they call these good aspects from the past “the common good”? Why not leave it at “golden decades,” or simply “good aspects” or “things we long for”? Because they rely, implicitly, on a stereotyped diagnosis of social ills, modeled on the structure of a collective action problem—the very structure that, in ordinary policy debate, is understood to justify state intervention in defense of some shared good.
A collective action problem, after all, must begin with a common good: the village green, the fishing shoals—for an example here, take it to be home-based manufacturing. Next, individuals acting on their own self-interest do things that incrementally detract from this common good—take it to be outsourcing. The effect is small in each case, but cumulatively the common good is depleted (see the trend line over the past century of manufacturing as a percentage of GDP). What to do, then? Informal agreements never coalesced; and there is no recourse to privatization; therefore, a strong government—tariffs, industrial policy—must intervene to restore the common good. As some on the New Right are reputed to say, “the most appropriate limit on the government is no limit.”
The rhetorical trick lies in what this borrowed structure allows the New Right to skip. In an ordinary policy conversation about a collective action problem, one still has to ask what the shared asset is actually worth, and whether the proposed intervention’s costs are justified by its benefits—the same questions we would ask about a village green or a fishing shoal. But once the asset in question is baptized “the common good,” those questions no longer need asking, because no cost could be weighed against something bearing that name. (Remember: “the” common good is at the top of a hierarchy of goods.) Even granting, for argument’s sake, that mid-century domestic manufacturing employment presented a genuine collective action problem, rather than simply a state of the market at one time, it hardly follows that restoring it is the common good, in the sense in which classical and American political thought have used that phrase. It is one policy goal among many, and a contestable one. Dressing it in Aristotelian language does not make it “the” common good; it only exempts it from the ordinary discipline of asking whether it is worth what it costs.
Talk of “the common good” today rightly elicits suspicion, because those most eager to invoke it are not talking about the distinctive American common good at all; what they call “the common good” are various partial goods, dressed up to look whole. The dressing-up is not incidental—it is the entire point. Once a partial good is baptized “the common good,” government intervention on its behalf no longer needs to be argued for; it only needs to be announced. And since they alone speak this language, they alone decide what qualifies.
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]]>The improper state maintains its power with two primary tools: narrative and institutional control. This phenomenon illustrates how state expansion and paternalism disguise themselves. Under the banner of social welfare, benevolent public planning, or socialist redistribution, the improper state aggressively encroaches upon the private spheres of human action. It commands the economy, directs industrial production, monopolizes subsoil assets, and controls critical social sectors like education and health care. It constructs a humanitarian narrative, using this veneer to hide a predatory structural mechanism.
Over time, the fundamental relationship between the governed and the governor undergoes a teleological inversion: the citizen shifts from a sovereign constituent or stakeholder into a supplicant for state-directed rents, while the State transforms from an impartial arbiter into a dominant economic predator. This institutional model, intrinsically bound to rent-seeking, systematically alters societal incentives by replacing market dynamics with the bureaucratic capture of privileges.
True liberty is structurally impossible under these conditions because the state’s fiscal and administrative autonomy untethers the ruler from the consent and prosperity of the governed.
The Power of Narratives
Institutions do not exist in a cultural vacuum; they are built upon, sustained by, and legitimized through public narratives. An Improper State rarely exposes its predatory nature openly. Instead, it weaponizes romanticized political and economic rhetoric to capture the moral high ground, successfully masking structural extraction under the guise of benevolence. In the Latin American context, this masking has been achieved through a deliberate, sophisticated narrative strategy designed to alter public perception, erode individual liberty, and cement total societal control.
Modern leftist movements have widely abandoned purely militaristic paths to power, opting instead for a Gramscian strategy of cultural hegemony. They have learned to control a society’s politics and economy by controlling its language, education, and moral narratives. Leftist ideology systematically captures the moral high ground by positioning itself as the sole defender of “the poor,” “the marginalized,” and “social justice.” In Latin America, whether tracing the trajectory from traditional Peronism to its evolution under kirchnerismo in Argentina (which mastered a moral binary of “national and popular” versus oligarchic elites to justify fiscal irresponsibility and market controls), the Cuban narrative blaming the blockade for its systemic failure, or the explicit anti-imperialist and socialist crusades of the Bolivarian project, these regimes systematically co-opt history, co-opt indigenous concepts like sumak kawsay, and deploy state-funded propaganda to drown out clear assessments of the grim economic reality.
Under this narrative, any defense of individual liberty, free enterprise, or limited government is aggressively branded as cold-hearted, greedy, or exploitative. By establishing this false moral dichotomy, leftist narratives cultivate the deeply ingrained expectation of state paternalism. The state is elevated to a secular deity, a compassionate provider responsible for correcting all earthly imbalances. Consequently, the citizen’s psychological framework undergoes a drastic shift: the desire for personal independence and responsibility is replaced by a sense of entitlement to state-directed distribution.
The Inversion of Rights
To dismantle the foundational pillars of freedom, leftist narratives execute a linguistic subversion of the concept of rights. In a classic, free society, rights are negative and defensive: they protect individual life, liberty, and private property against coercion and state predation. Leftist rhetoric deliberately replaces these with positive social rights, such as guaranteed housing, employment, health care, and education provided directly by the state apparatus.
This narrative contains a dangerous, hidden trap. Because the state cannot distribute what it does not first extract, the realization of positive social rights requires the aggressive expansion of state power. The state must command the economy, control industrial production, and implement punitive taxation or asset seizures. The narrative frames this coercion not as an assault on freedom, but as a moral victory for equity. By training the population to look to the state for basic survival, the leftist apparatus transforms the citizen from a sovereign stakeholder into a vulnerable supplicant. Liberty is quietly bartered away for the illusion of state-guaranteed security.
A core component of leftist narrative architecture is the perpetual manufacture of internal and external adversaries. Drawing heavily from Marxist class-warfare models, the leftist narrative divides society into static, binary, hostile groups: the oppressed (the proletariat or the people) and the oppressors (the bourgeoisie, domestic entrepreneurs, or foreign imperialists).
The State must be decoupled from its role as an economic actor and predatory rent-allocator, returning instead to its fundamental teleological function as an institutional guarantor of a stable rule of law.
Because the economic planning of the Improper State inevitably results in shortages, inflation, or economic decline, the leftist apparatus relies on this narrative to redirect public anger. The systemic failures of state interventionism are never blamed on the state planner; instead, they are blamed on “speculators” or “corporate greed.” By using this scapegoating narrative, the state justifies further regulatory crackdowns, price controls, and the closing of markets. The narrative acts as a psychological smoke screen, ensuring that even as the state actively consumes the nation’s wealth and chokes off innovation, it is viewed by its dependent constituencies as a protective shield against external malice.
A secondary, highly effective narrative asserts that intensive, exhaustive regulation is a form of moral oversight necessary to protect the public from market anarchy. Under this narrative shield, the proliferation of overlapping jurisdictions, contradictory laws, and massive regulatory paperwork is defended as rigorous public protection.
This narrative legitimizes administrative architecture that functions as a highly regressive tax. Large conglomerates and politically connected monopolies can absorb compliance budgets or secure regulatory shielding through proximity to political power. Conversely, ordinary citizens and micro-enterprises are completely priced out of legality. The narrative of “consumer protection” or “social justice” effectively covers the defense mechanisms of a predatory bureaucracy and its favored elites. By keeping transaction costs artificially high, the leftist state systematically blocks open market entry, dooming ordinary citizens to financial exile while maintaining a moral narrative that blames the free market for regional poverty.
Institutions as the Dynamic Anchors of Human Liberty
If narratives are the underlying software of a society, institutions are the hardware: the “rules of the game” that structure human interaction. Human liberty cannot survive as a mere abstract ideal; it requires a robust, non-distortionary institutional framework to protect it from arbitrary state predation. Liberty is not a moral luxury; it is the vital operational engine of economic growth.
The cornerstone of a Proper State is the structural alignment of the state’s survival with the wealth generation of its individuals. When an institutional framework forces the state to rely strictly on its taxpayers for its revenue, a healthy, reciprocal relationship is engineered. The state is compelled to act as an impartial referee, minimizing transaction costs and anchoring property rights, because its own fiscal survival depends entirely on the prosperity of its citizens.
Conversely, when leftist institutions decouple the state from the citizenry, for instance by allowing state monopoly over subsoil resources or enabling autonomous external rents, liberty is severely undermined. Financial autonomy unties the state apparatus from the people, transforming it into a dominant economic predator that actively competes against private initiative. True institutional liberty requires strict constitutional limits that legally bind the ruler to the consent and productivity of the governed.
Institutions dictate whether human talent is channeled toward wealth creation or wealth extraction. In an environment with secure property rights and low transaction costs, individuals engage in Schumpeterian innovation, optimizing resource allocation through the decentralized price mechanism. Prices aggregate and transmit localized, tacit information regarding scarcity and consumer preference far better than any centralized committee ever could.
When extractive institutions replace this spontaneous order with centralized planning, price controls, and discretionary licensing, individual human action is perverted. The institutional rules invert market incentives: the expected rate of return on lobbying the state for a protective regulation or a monopoly favor becomes exponentially higher than investing in new technologies or research and development. Real market competition is suffocated by bureaucratic paralysis, driving the most vulnerable and entrepreneurial agents into the informal underground economy as a rational defensive mechanism against exclusionary legal architecture.
The convergence of economic, political, and social dynamics reveals that the Improper State is a chillingly stable, self-reinforcing extractive equilibrium. While this resilience does not stem from internal health or organic prosperity, it is forcefully sustained by state-enforced coercion, fear, and systemic intimidation, explaining why these destructive systems prove so stubbornly difficult to eradicate. It creates an institutional environment where wealth is endlessly captured and distributed through political patronage but rarely generated through market innovation. However, as Friedrich Hayek famously warned in The Road to Serfdom, this predatory descent into totalitarian control could never sustain itself over time through brute force alone; it requires a deep psychological and cultural transformation. This is precisely where the critical relevance of leftist narratives lies: in their unique capacity to penetrate the deepest fibers of societies, numb the sense of individual responsibility, and normalize cultural dependency before proceeding to capture the public apparatus.
By masking the unbridled expansion of the State under the rhetoric of compassion, equality, and the alleged benefits of central planning, these narratives successfully capture the moral high ground in public debate. They manage to convince majorities that aggressive state intervention is not an act of predation, but of benevolent protection. Nevertheless, empirical reality forcefully confirms that state ownership of production and the monopolization of natural resources serve as the ultimate grave of private initiative. The leftist narrative functions as the definitive vehicle of penetration because it transforms the very psychology of the citizen, turning members of society into ideological defenders of the exact same architecture that extracts from them and impoverishes them.
To transition away from this labyrinth of extraction and toward sustainable economic development, a structural re-engineering of the state apparatus is required. Dismantling both the physical bureaucracy and the discursive framework that shields it demands a deliberate return to strict constitutionalism and the principles of classical liberal theory and public choice (such as those advanced by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, or James Buchanan) to permanently limit the scope of political power. The State must be decoupled from its role as an economic actor and predatory rent-allocator, returning instead to its fundamental teleological function as an institutional guarantor of a stable rule of law. This requires robust constitutional frameworks that protect absolute private property rights, enforce strict fiscal rules to prevent executive discretion, and minimize transaction costs. Only by anchoring these institutional safeguards can an economy replace the parasitic pursuit of state-mediated rent with productive, innovation-driven growth.
The path toward a Proper State is therefore a foundational structural requirement anchored in limited government, legal certainty, and institutional checks and balances serving as the essential baseline for long-term stability and ultimate genuine liberty for all citizens.
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]]>Our former Senior Tutor at Pembroke College in Cambridge used to say in his speech to the incoming first-year students, on their first day: “You’re not here to learn to be clever; you’re here to learn to be kind.” We should all perhaps reflect on that message, in the aftermath of the tragedy of Jason Arday.
Yes: but not, I would submit, for very long, for it is the most obvious and transparent drivel, all the worse for emanating from high authority. Students at Cambridge already are clever, and kindness is not a university subject, although given the debasement of academic life it is entirely possible there might one day be a chair of kindness theory, as in some universities in Britain there are now chairs of Critical Race Theory, Equalities and Diversity in Education. (Given the current trajectory of the progressive left, I await with bated breath the establishment of the first chair in the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy Theory.)
This is not to say, of course, that kindness is undesirable or that it is not better than its opposite. Nor is it true that kindness cannot, in some sense, be taught or learned, though no doubt people differ temperamentally in how naturally inclined to kindness they are. But insofar as it is taught, it is by example rather than by precept, and mostly before anyone arrives as a student at university. A clinical instructor in medicine implicitly teaches his students the right way to approach patients, but the kindness of doctors must not be such as to overwhelm or undermine the detachment and objectivity that is essential to the proper practice of the profession. There is a balance to be struck, and not every doctor manages it all the time.
The chancellor of Cambridge University would not have started his article with such unctuously sentimental words if he had paid more attention to Agatha Christie. No doubt she would have represented an intellectual comedown for a scholar of Coleridge and Wordsworth such as Smith once was, but many serious philosophers have delighted to read crime novels and thought that they could learn something from them. Despite never claiming to be more than middlebrow, Agatha Christie sowed her books with gentle social satire and serious moral reflection, though in such a way that the reader would have to pause on his way to the solution of the puzzle to take full cognizance of it.
In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, for example, Mrs. Christie makes the point (if we are alert to it) that kindness by itself can be of doubtful value and even harmful. There are two characters in the book who are kind and mean well and yet do no good: for meaning well and doing good are two different things, only tangentially related.
In the above-mentioned book, a Miss Knight has been hired by Miss Marple’s generous nephew to look after her in the wake of a bout of bronchitis. Miss Knight is undoubtedly kind, but it is kindness that does not stop to consider its effects on those—in this case Miss Marple—upon whom it is exercised. She treats Miss Marple as though she were a piece of Meissen porcelain, quite unnecessarily and to Miss Marple’s intense irritation.
Kindness alone that is not allied to thought, reflection, and the search for truth is not—except in the simplest of situations—a good guide to conduct.
In other words, Miss Knight’s kindness is free-floating and always avid for an object upon which to exercise itself. This does not mean that it is not genuine; Miss Knight really is kind. But her kindness reminds one of the Christian virtues run wild as described by G. K. Chesterton once they are detached from their theological anchorage. They become incontinent, and incontinent virtues do a great deal of harm by misapplication.
The kindness that Chris Smith appears to think that the university should teach its students is of this variety. But life does not consist just of helping old ladies across the road, though helping old ladies across the road is a good and kindly thing to do. (I am alarmed but a little hurt, though somewhat grateful, when young people on the London Underground or Paris Métro stand up for me, as an aged person in need of a seat.)
Smith’s kindess is akin to sentimentality, which is rarely a good guide to conduct, let alone to policy. It is the psychological or moral equivalent of the warm feeling one gets from a whisky on a cold day: it gives a warm feeling inside. But whisky is not an answer to hypothermia.
If students are to learn kindness, who is to teach it? Would one exclude a don because he was waspish or acerbic in his manner, though brilliant in his work? Surely one of the lessons of the Jason Arday affair is that misplaced kindness can lead to tragic results.
The evidence of the case suggests that Jason Arday was appointed from an abstract kindness applied demographically, that is to say, kindness towards a demographic group perceived as having suffered immemorial injustice. A harder-headed attitude to his application would have avoided the tragedy, because it would have revealed at once, and without difficulty, that he was not a fit person for the position he was selected to fill. He would not have risen as high, of course, but he would not have experienced the catastrophic fall that was so much more important. He was the victim of a free-floating kindness or benevolence, such as Miss Knight’s in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, that resulted in a cruel denouement.
Kindness alone that is not allied to thought, reflection, and the search for truth is not—except in the simplest of situations—a good guide to conduct. Students come to university not to learn kindness, but to learn to think, reflect, and search for truth.
Perhaps, then, we should indeed reflect on the message of the former senior tutor of Pembroke College.
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]]>This is the second essay in a symposium on the common good. You can read the first essay by John Grove here, and you can read the final essay by Michael Pakaluk here.
Alasdair MacIntyre was a political animal, or so one naturally assumes. He was at any rate an Aristotelian, and since Aristotle declared man to be the zoon politikon (“political animal”), it seems safe to say that MacIntyre thought of himself as one such. Nevertheless, for much of his life he was deeply reluctant to enter into political discourse.
In youth, he was (in)famously a Marxist. Eventually he broke with the socialists and made his way to Aristotelian Thomism. He spent decades writing on the incoherence of modern moral theory, giving considerable attention along the way to action theory, the virtues, and the history of philosophy. But he largely eschewed political discourse, to the frustration of political theorists who hoped to enlist him as an ally.
Pierre Manent, for instance, took him to task in a 2005 essay, complaining that MacIntyre was unwilling to engage questions that followed very naturally from his work, leaving his readers with a “mutilated” Aristotle unwilling to raise his eyes beyond the narrow confines of the worker’s guild or the monastery. Though MacIntyre was happy to toss the occasional barb at the modern nation-state, Manent noted, “the political framework in which European man organized his life for many centuries surely merits more than some brisk expressions of contempt.”
Perhaps the criticism stung. Of course, Aristotle’s zoon politikon does not really need to be “political” in the most obvious sense of throwing himself into electoral politics; nevertheless, he should care about justice and the well-ordered political regime. The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics should be harmonized, not separated. Very late in his life, therefore, MacIntyre did dip a toe back into those waters, venturing some thoughts on the questions Manent had once accused him of avoiding. A helpful sampling of this work can be found in a collection recently released by Notre Dame Press, Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, which gives valuable perspective on MacIntyre’s late-life views on politics, economics, and the common good.
MacIntyre was an important mentor of mine 25 years ago, at roughly the same time he was aggravating his fellow Aristotelian across the Atlantic. I remember him being quite reticent to engage political questions. It was interesting, therefore, to have the opportunity to give sustained attention to the more political writings of his later years. They are highly relevant, in fact, to recent debates on “the common good,” though I doubt MacIntyre himself would have relished the chance to weigh in.
Certainly, the MacIntyre I remember (as Manent also noted) did very much point towards more explicitly political questions. He was keenly interested in the relationship of moral philosophy to politics and culture. In his lectures, he showed how particular works of moral theory reflected a wider society’s concerns, but also how moral paradigms facilitated (or failed to facilitate) the thriving of ordinary people enmeshed in a given culture. There was no one quite like MacIntyre for turning the story of philosophy into a kind of epic narrative of human civilizations seeking the good, with philosophy and lived experience mirroring each other in complex ways. In his perspective, doing philosophy was a very consequential activity indeed.
Contemporary advocates of a “common-good politics” may be pleased to hear that MacIntyre unambiguously wants the same thing.
That lofty view naturally prompts a further question: What about our own time? Here, MacIntyre’s answer was famously bleak. He believed that modernity’s moral landscape had fractured, leaving us, like the hapless survivors of Babel, patching together bits of malformed and incompatible languages. Some historical periods had gravely defective moral views, but we ourselves simply had no cohesive moral view. Recovering that for ourselves, and by extension perhaps for our own communities, seemed to me to be the core goal of the courses I took with MacIntyre at Notre Dame in the early 2000s.
Those lines of inquiry move naturally towards more explicitly political questions, especially when it’s understood that human beings are deeply shaped (or “habituated,” as a good Aristotelian might say) by their surrounding culture. Since MacIntyre was fascinated by civilization-spanning questions about philosophy, culture, and civilizational greatness, his work overflows quite naturally into political discourse. In a modern context, of course, that probably implies some kind of reclamation or reform. If modern societies are truly as degraded as he suggested in After Virtue, what kind of improvement could we optimally hope to see or advance? Is there some attainable political regime or culture that could more successfully facilitate the thriving of modern people? In the short term, perhaps, Benedict-Option bunkers are a necessary cope, but is there a more sustainable or scalable path out of our modern, Babel-like hellscape?
Contemporary advocates of a “common-good politics” may be pleased to hear that MacIntyre unambiguously wants the same thing. His late political writings all posit this as the clear desired goal. His further thoughts on the subject may disappoint, however. His concrete recommendations are exceedingly tentative and modest. He refuses to sanction any existing political party or movement, and categorically rejects the modern state, in anything like its present form, as a suitable agent for implementing a common-good agenda. Again and again he returns to the same evocative point: We really don’t know how to build a politics of the common good. Modernity has raised significant obstacles, and we’re still answering very fundamental questions about how to surmount them.
If this point is downplayed, or lost in the political shuffle, one loses practically all the benefits MacIntyre associates with a politics of the common good. It’s child’s play for a political partisan, nominally acknowledging the difficulty of achieving “the common good,” to treat it as aspirational and frame his own platform as a set of incremental steps towards that goal. It’s even easier, of course, to identify one’s opponents as the primary obstacle to success. But that is emphatically not a MacIntyrean perspective.
MacIntyre views a robust politics of the common good as something that can only really be achieved within a complete political community. Think of the Aristotelian polis as the archetype: the culture must be rooted in a substantial shared vision, and all members must contribute to, and benefit from, that shared life. To be complete, a community must embrace members of all ages with their wide array of needs, which include moral needs as well as material. It’s not enough to feed people. A complete community must also strive to meet people’s social and emotional needs, and to inculcate the virtues.
The “common good” in this sense is distinguished from a collectivist or statist ideal because it incorporates the community’s members, facilitating their real good, instead of treating individuals as expendable cogs in the statist machine. A true common good politics must bring the interests of the community and its members into close alignment, not just with respect to particular practical concerns (such as crime control or trash pick-up) but in deeper and more holistic ways. It must facilitate the moral good of both simultaneously.
Even a cursory glance at modern history should make clear that this is, at the very least, quite difficult to attain, though every power-hungry autocrat will cheerfully claim to have something like “the common good” as his goal. Trusting any authority or political movement to deliver on such promises is naïve in the extreme, as MacIntyre clearly sees. If the kind of “common good” he desires is even possible, it can only be achieved in the context of an organic community, rooted in a substantial tradition and governed through processes that inhibit concentrations of power and facilitate community-level deliberation about priorities and policies.
MacIntyre loved to muse on small-scale communities that have a real and recognizable common good: fishing crews, string quartets, sports teams. Members work cooperatively towards jointly-embraced goals, and their success or failure is truly “shared” in a thick way that reflects a deeply internalized set of rules, practices, and collectively valued goods. These however are not complete communities; their functions are much narrower, and they lack mechanisms to care for the old or sick, or to habituate the young. People enter and exit them voluntarily, and membership itself is generally conditional on competence; if you can’t haul a net, play a stringed instrument, or catch a ball, these communities have no place for you. A complete community, grounded in a humane moral vision, would have to make room for everyone (or at least all people willing to respect custom and abide by law). Achieving that alignment of purpose and interests in a broader community is clearly a far more ambitious project, especially in today’s populous and pluralistic societies, where the inhabitants of a single township or city block generally represent a wide range of worldviews.
One natural move at this juncture, embraced by many present-day influencers, is to decry particular modern circumstances that have ostensibly made complete communities so elusive. Coals can be heaped on “cosmopolitan elites,” global markets, or labor practices perceived as unfair, undignified, or “anti-family.” Almost any aspect of modern life that is plausibly inimical to someone’s thriving can potentially supply the basis for a “common good” demand for political reform. Today’s political right is saturated in arguments of that kind.
Within our polarized political discourse, the bar is generally quite low for establishing that a proposed reform measure would in fact address the identified evil. Thus, we have seen a wide range of initiatives ostensibly intended to bring markets into line with some more philosophical (or perhaps ideological) vision of “the good.” Economists will explain ad nauseam why these policies are unlikely to achieve “the common good,” and may not advance anyone’s good for long (is there a “common bad?”), but it can be hard for these arguments to get traction when self-styled reformers have already made a noisy show of rejecting the entire framework of modern economics.
In other cases, it may take more work to connect the dots between populist policy and the inchoate yearning for a more robust, shared “common good.” Those connections may be real and revelatory, however. For instance, it is clear that the sprawling, bureaucratic administrative state is spectacularly unsuited to realizing a true common good, with millions of very diverse people under its purview. MacIntyre made that point repeatedly. There’s no neat solution to that problem, but immigration restrictionism can supply a kind of political outlet for the angst people feel about huge, sprawling societies with a limited capacity to embrace a shared vision of the good life. This is not of course to deny that immigration raises real challenges, of a sort that should interest a politician or informed citizen. It clearly does, but one can recognize that reality while still suspecting that the energy populist movements generate surrounding this issue is largely explained by the frustration many feel with the modern state’s incapacity to function as a more fitting vessel for a thick, common-good politics.
One can understand, in light of that frustration, why we see angry populists issuing dramatic, uncompromising condemnations of core features of modern life: liberalism, pluralism, the global economic order. But MacIntyre rejected that form of rejectionism. It’s hard to think of anyone with a keener appreciation of modernity’s deficiencies; nevertheless, he insisted it was necessary to find ways to live in the world as it was. He realized, in making that case, that he was working with a limited toolkit. He had no principled commitment to free markets, social contracts, or any understanding of civil, political, or human rights; to the contrary, he had a marked hostility to the entire classical liberal tradition and all its modern-state apparatus, which one can at least understand given his defining life project of charting the fragmentation of modern moral discourse. The downside to that view, however, was that he simply had no framework for securing order without falling prey to the power-hungry state. He believed deeply in organic order, but rejected all plausible accounts of emergent order, which left him with no practical account of how a functional political community could actually form under modern circumstances.
Anyone sincerely trying to execute MacIntyre’s recommended project would have to conclude that today’s right is, at the very least, getting very far over their skis.
He was admirably aware of the problem, and he did speculate a bit on possible solutions. Certainly, his preference was for an order that would emerge from rational, communal deliberation. Occasionally (as for instance in his essay on “Two Kinds of Political Reasoning”), he muses a bit on scenarios in which a kind of common good politics begins to grow out of a shared community need, such as a local effort to build a good school. But this is fairly far-fetched, as he himself seemed to recognize. He denies that it’s Utopian (to me it sounds pretty Utopian), but he indulged only a little in that kind of speculation. In general, he contented himself with urging others to continue building a framework that could facilitate a more common-good-oriented politics.
How would we do that? To the very end of his life, MacIntyre harbored hope that certain pieces could be mined from Marxist literature and grafted successfully into a more Aristotelian-Thomist framework, leading to a more viable common-good politics. The above-mentioned essay also claims that “there have been some notable cases in the modern world from the seventeenth-century onwards in which a politics of the common good was able to achieve its ends in a small scale political society.” He cites four: the Jesuit-led Guarani Indian settlements of eighteenth-century Paraguay, the kibbutzim of British Palestine, the Indian state of Kerala after the Marxists came to power in 1957, and “successful farming and fishing cooperatives” in Glencolmcille in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. These examples have something in common. They’re all essentially communist. In a rather remarkable discourse on the financial system, titled “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” MacIntyre calls for a new foundation for economic analysis that “brings Aquinas and Marx together.” Any takers?
There’s a reason, though, why MacIntyre still wanted to draw on Marx as a possible resource for building a common-good politics. If one insists on rejecting classical liberalism wholesale as a resource, that leaves political theory with some very sizable deficits to be filled. It’s to his credit that he saw this and largely accepted the fact. His essay on the financial section, for instance, includes an explicit rejection of the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, accompanied by this explanation:
The critics of globalization sometimes talk as though there is somewhere offstage some alternative to the globalisating economy that we now have, a set of possible economic structures that would be free from the evils of globalization. The truth is that we have no alternative to the globalising economy as it now is and that its propensities for good and for harm cannot be split apart. To be for or against globalization is in some ways like being for or against the weather.
Today’s New Right would do well to read and reflect on this essay. If one wants to build a complete politics on a thoroughgoing Aristotelianism, with no compromising concessions to the likes of Hobbes or Locke, it’s hard to think of a more brilliant or principled foundational resource than MacIntyre. But anyone sincerely trying to execute MacIntyre’s recommended project would have to conclude that today’s right is, at the very least, getting very far over their skis. Right-wing influencers and politicians love to talk as though they understand the common good, and even know how to achieve it, but are hindered primarily by narrow-minded utilitarians indifferent to human dignity. No MacIntyrean could take that stance.
To underscore that point, here is MacIntyre’s conclusion to a 2011 essay in which he criticized Jacques Maritain for trying to bridge the Thomistic tradition with a more modern understanding of human rights. This work is particularly interesting when one reflects that MacIntyre and Maritain were surely the twentieth century’s two most illustrious converts to Aristotelian Thomism. The Scot regards the Frenchman’s harmonizing effort as a failure. But, sympathizing with the project, he ends on the following lines:
Even if we reject Maritain’s view of the possibilities of the modern state, we need a politics of the modern state that is consonant with a politics of the common good. And this we do not as yet have. Moreover, the rhetorical politics of universal human rights, the partial definition of conflicts by referring to such rights, is an established fact. So that a skeptical critique of the very idea of human right has to be a prologue to an account of how protagonists of the politics of common goods should position themselves with regard to such conflicts. And this we do not as yet know how to do.
Would that everyone were so frank about the things they “do not as yet know how to do.”
Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.
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]]>The post Political Moralizing appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>This is the first essay in a symposium on the common good. You can read Rachel Lu’s essay here and Michael Pakaluk’s essay here.
Another round of “common good” discourse has swept across the conservative landscape. When this phrase first started to become the center of attention in conservative circles several years ago, the conversation was driven largely by eccentric Roman Catholic integralists whose extremism ultimately made the conversation look silly to many observers. This time around, those arguing for something like “common good conservatism” are taking a more moderate stance. No more talk of the moral bankruptcy of the original American constitutional order; no more throne and altar; no more moral quandaries about whether to clandestinely baptize and kidnap Jewish babies.
Yet the vocal advocates of common-good language often still continue to avoid the meaningful question at stake. Much of the published debate over the past few weeks seems to be concerned mostly with whether we ought to use that specific phrase (“the common good”) when talking about desirable political or social arrangements. That is not a particularly important question.
One entrant in the debate defined the common good as “the ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing.” Surely any one of us can easily put together such an “ensemble” that in his judgment would be conducive to “flourishing.” (We could also put those same conditions together and not use the phrase “the common good” to describe them.) And on the other side, one could argue that true human “flourishing” requires individual freedom, and call the conditions that allow for that “the common good.” And of course many have used phrases like “the common good” or the “general good” simply to mean something that benefits all parts of society, not merely one group. It is rather pointless to insist on the phrase, or to ceremoniously disclaim it, if you’re not willing to get down to brass tacks about what is actually being contested.
And what is actually being contested in contemporary discourse, of course, is government power and political ambition. The postliberal-leaning crowd, which has been largely responsible for the expansion of “common good” talk, has always been eager to see government power used in a paternalistic attempt to remake society after a particular model. As one recent commentary argued, “the point of societies [is] to embody a particular conception of the good life,” and the point of politics is to choose which vision it will embody, and to get us there as much as possible. If that is the claim, then the question worth pursuing is about the kinds of goods the institutions and practices of politics are actually capable of securing.
The common-good framework demands this question be asked. Almost no reasonable person would hold that the political state can directly provide the entire “ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing.” And nearly everyone would acknowledge that the political state does secure some shared goods (except, presumably, the hypothetical quasi-anarchic libertarians against which most postliberal essays seem to be written). So if we are supposed to use the common good as a meaningful political category, we would have to inquire further about what goods we can reasonably expect to be secured through political action, and which ones are better attained (or can only be attained) through some other form of interaction.
But this essential question seems to be the very one that common-good advocates are allergic to. Indeed, one reason they seem so insistent on using that specific phrase is precisely because it obscures the question. Instead of drawing attention specifically to what we can and can’t reasonably expect from politics, the phrase “the common good” dissolves such distinctions and puts all goods shared between human beings into one big bucket. And since we’re all obviously pulling something out of that bucket to describe what politics should do, we can’t be upset about what they choose to pull from it.
In his final book, the late, great political theorist Kenneth Minogue brilliantly diagnosed the tendency of contemporary liberals to “bypass[] the dialogue of morals and politics” by collapsing both into a category he called the “politico-moral” realm. From the Greeks on, the West had retained a sense that there is a perennial tension between moral questions (“what is the right thing to do?”) and political questions (“what does the polis demand?”). Yet there has also existed an allure of “the idea of harmonious monism,” in which all the complexities of moral decisions, and all the questions about the proper task of politics are collapsed into “social criticism” in the form of “grandiose remarks about the supposed condition of our society as a whole.” When that happens, political and moral questions become one and the same, and they both boil down to holding the correct views about what society as a whole ought to look like and then using political levers to make it so.
By blurring any distinction between the total goods of a social order and those goods specifically secured by politics, today’s common-good conservatives are leaning in the same direction. The way the conversations often go, social desirability in the abstract becomes the primary criterion of political judgment.
But the approach often entails vast oversimplifications, not least of which is the oft-repeated presumption that social or political orders are the projection of a unified, coherent vision of The Good. There is a vast conceptual middle ground between absolute, metaphysical neutrality (against which the postliberals tend to pit their arguments, and which is, as they point out, impossible), and a society consciously built around a single coherent ideal good (which is equally impossible).
By teaching that the good life must be politically arranged for you, the politico-moral inclination degrades the virtues that are actually necessary to live well in an unsettled time.
Indeed, in some ways, the postliberal politico-morality (the idea that society is to embody a particular vision of the good life, and that politics is how we make that happen) is a collectivized, mirror-image of the autonomous individualism it critiques. The atomized, empowered individual demands complete, uninhibited freedom to choose his (or xis?) own identity, choose his own values, and have social conditions adjusted by law to accommodate his choices. Rather than challenge the basic assumptions about the possibility of such absolute freedom of choice, the postliberal collectivizes it. There is very little wrestling with the complex relationship between law, culture, and morality. The Good is simply out there for us to choose voluntarily. We just do so collectively.
No real individual or society, though, ever has such a clean choice. In real polities, the law will reflect certain moral sentiments that operate within a society, but those sentiments are the product of innumerable influences, not one unified vision that we are consciously able to pursue. And insofar as the morality of a society is reflected in its law, it also needs to be filtered through some other shared or negotiated standard of what is appropriate to the realm of politics and what is not.
That standard, of course, is also a matter of contestation, and it’s not my purpose here to lay out my own views in any detail. But those who make grandiose claims for politics ought to defend their proposition with some basic questions in view. Is government actually capable of manipulating a social order to match a chosen model? If it is, are the institutions and practices of the modern state such that it is likely to choose a good model, rather than one that gratifies the impulses of the electorate? Can we be confident that an attempt to legislate a morally unified society won’t disrupt the relationship between citizens in other, unintended ways? In choosing to ban or incentivize a certain activity for the people’s own good, does government inadvertently entangle itself in a broader area, in which it will do more harm than good? Are there certain human goods that can only be attained precisely when they are not pursued with collective political goals in mind?
These are not new questions, and a common-good framework would seem to demand answers to them. But its contemporary advocates are often keen to dismiss them with a handwave and an offhand comment about how “libertarianism didn’t work.”
To answer those questions though, we might consider certain qualities of the political state in the modern West: It is impersonal and necessarily bureaucratic. It is possessed of power that can’t be rivalled by any other institution. It is essentially an involuntary association. Its scale is such that decisions are made far away from the daily activity of life. Insofar as it is answerable to society at large, it responds primarily to mass opinion, generally manipulated by those who profit in one way or another from public discontent.
In short, it is a blunt instrument that seems unlikely to make moral judgments with any degree of subtlety. Its power and scope make it well-positioned to enforce certain broad standards of conduct between the various parts of society, upholding a framework of public expectations that we have for one another. But if instead of upholding public expectations, government tries to create its own standards of the good without a social consensus around them, it is much more likely to create rent-seeking and perpetual conflict than a morally unified society. American experience over the past century is a prime example.
Many of the specific points of policy that the common-gooders point to as examples (restrictions on kids’ use of social media, age verification for adult websites, or limits on abortion) are perfectly compatible with a much more limited conception of the political sphere. So why is it that they claim so much more for politics? Perhaps they really believe that blue laws will make America pious again. But it may just be that they realize how enticing the “allure of harmonious monism” is, especially to animated young men who don’t know any better.
But the tendency to talk about politics in such comprehensive terms has consequences. It raises expectations for political institutions that cannot be met. In doing so, it not only breeds disillusionment, but also undermines government’s ability to attain the goods it actually can achieve. As Thomas Sowell convincingly argued in one of his more neglected books, the more people expect politics to provide “cosmic justice,” the more it is pulled away from the traditional justice that offers a stable, if imperfect, civil life.
But it also has consequences for character. Minogue recognized the politico-moral inclination as a manifestation of creeping moral servility. It presents the collective project, rather than the messy reality of real human relationships, as the playing field of virtue. It redirects moral energies to an arena which can only culminate in disappointment and disillusion. And by teaching that the good life must be politically arranged for you, it degrades the virtues that are actually necessary to live well in an unsettled time.
“The common good,” like any other term, is only as useful as the discourse around it. It could be an opening to a more precise discussion of various shared human goods, perhaps aiming to get beyond “rights talk.” But currently, it is being used as shorthand for more expansive government and loftier expectations of politics, while avoiding the hard questions. As long as that remains the case, the term ought to be met with skepticism.
Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.
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]]>The post Dolly Parton’s American Life appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>And it’s not hard to see why. Dolly was a beautiful woman and a very shrewd businesswoman, a musician with a beautiful voice and a successful actress, a proud Tennessean, devoted to her Appalachian people, and also a very generous philanthropist. She spellbound the nation by living the American dream.
Dolly moved to Nashville as soon as she finished high school and became famous fairly quickly by singing duets on The Porter Wagoner Show (1966–74), trading banter, or singing spirituals. She also released 13 albums in that period, from Hello, I’m Dolly (1967) to Jolene (1974), including most of her most beloved songs: “Dumb Blonde,” “Joshua,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” “I Will Always Love You,” and “Jolene.”
Although her success became all-American, her best songs, like her origins, are distinctly Southern. Some memory of the rural way of life is part of the great attraction of country music, which could be called a sentimental turning away from modernity, based on the worry that we’re not sure who we are or what we love anymore. Love and regret, childhood and family—somehow all this sounds more honest, so that it pulls at the heartstrings, in abstraction from modern industry.
Dolly reminds us of that remarkable mid-century moment in which American culture was dominated by the Western, which is among other things a way to make the South lovable again, after the Civil War. Aside from the great Western movies of John Ford, whose long career peaked in the mid-century, the brand-new media of radio and television were also full of Westerns, and there were incredibly popular Western novelists who sold hundreds of millions of copies—and that’s just Louis L’Amour. And there was country music and rock’n’roll. All very Southern. Dolly may have been the last memory of all that.
Dolly married at 20 and stuck to it. She seems to have had a happy marriage; she certainly was proud of her marriage. In that way, too, she didn’t want to modernize. Her earnestness might seem deluded, but America’s adventure with free love and easy divorce since the 1960s has been a huge catastrophe. Probably, Dolly knew more about love than what has been fashionable in the last two or three generations.
The universal love of Dolly may also be a subtle and unrecognized indictment of modern American feminism. Dolly was certainly a strong woman, but she was not a feminist, as she herself sometimes stated (with some qualification). This may have been because she didn’t want to politicize the feelings at the core of her art, which was mostly about love and home. She defended the Southern way of life for the same reasons.
The role of music in American life in that sense was fundamentally defensive. Not only in the sense of nostalgia or a conservative attitude or a reaction to rapid changes—but in the sense of preserving some kind of division between private and public life. It takes a certain kind of daring to sing about love, although we have taken it for granted for so long. But it would neither be necessary nor possible if we didn’t fear that we’re in danger of forgetting about it or losing it because our way of life tends towards the impersonal.
Dolly comforts us and inspires us and that more such American lives will be lived, the better for all the good she has done.
The other aspect of that defense of American life, of course, is religion. Dolly recorded quite a number of hymns and spirituals even beyond the more discrete influence of church on her music, starting with The Golden Streets of Glory (1971), which she reissued as Letter to Heaven: Songs of Faith & Inspiration in 2010, with the addition of many other similar songs she’d recorded. Some of these she wrote herself—one was written by her preacher grandfather, “Book of Life.”
Dolly’s youthful success launched a career aimed at immortality, in which she sold more than 100 million records, was nominated for everything you can think of—Oscars, Golden Globes, the Tony—and won Grammys and Emmys, and who knows how many other things. She still has more than 16 million monthly listeners on Spotify. It’s fair to say she was a big part of the American soundtrack in the period when pop culture became global.
Dollywood, however, has to be her best business idea, because it is family entertainment. The park, between Knoxville and the Smoky Mountains, may be unique in America for its dedication to a daughter of the region and its attempt to preserve in a playful way, since it’s just entertainment, the memory of the way of life of the region. Dolly bought into the park in 1986; before that, it had turned from one Americana idea to another for a couple of decades, starting out as a Civil War entertainment, moving on to the Gold Rush, then the Old West, before becoming what it is now. And it is incredibly successful and beloved, visited by 3-4 million people a year (even though it doesn’t operate most of the winter), and still growing.
Dolly is also loved a great deal for her philanthropy, from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which she started in 1995 and which has delivered something like 300 million books to kids in the Anglosphere, to the My People Fund (there’s a name!) for disaster relief after wildfires in the Smokey Mountains back in 2016 or, more recently, Hurricane Helene in 2024.
Dolly understood that human nature includes not just sweetness, but much envy and resentment besides, aimed especially, of course, at the beautiful, the wealthy, and so on among us. But her obvious love of people and loyalty to her roots, her tireless work raising money and creating jobs, in short becoming such an astonishing benefactor—that overwhelmed any resentment and made people love her even more for it.
That’s a remarkable American life. There’s very little an obit can do to sum it up or measure it, beyond recalling the most powerful moral motives and the most beautiful successes in a career; even this little cannot be done without causing ourselves the pain of grief, a loss in which we feel somehow involved. It suddenly becomes obvious that life is apart from the music that beautifies life; apart from business and philanthropy; we can be glad to pay in tears for all the sweetness, and hope that Dolly comforts us and inspires us and that more such American lives will be lived, the better for all the good she has done.
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]]>The post Kafka’s <em>The Trial</em> and the Jews appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>Kafka writes that K “lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.” But K, who is stripped and executed in a stone quarry at the end of the book, at one point sees a picture of Justice that a painter is fashioning according to the instructions of the court. His crayon drawing portrays the figure of Justice as blindfolded and flying with the aid of wings on her feet—a bad combination, K remarks, because “Justice must stand quite still, or else the scales will waver and a just verdict will become impossible.” The painter explains that the image depicts “Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.” As he adds shading to the drawing, the figure begins to look “exactly like a goddess of the Hunt in full cry.”
This monstrous transformation of justice is nothing less than a prophecy of the replacement of ordinary legal rights by official bureaucracies of murder under Fascism and Communism. And it is the reemergence of bloodlust under the guise of justice that should most concern readers of The Trial today. Many people, grouped according to various criteria—economic, racial, ethnic, religious, sexuality—have been judged and harshly punished by their societies since Kafka’s death in 1924. But the Jews, endlessly confronted by charges that are unanswerable because they shift to fit changing circumstances, lead the list. As with the defendants prosecuted by the court, every judgment of them is provisional; every case against them, subject to being reopened.
The extreme disfiguration of Justice that Kafka describes presupposes a degree of societal complicity in tyranny that leaves almost no one with clean hands. In fact, The Trial implicates virtually everyone in know-nothing attitudes and self-serving behaviors that are advantageous to the court. In the book’s opening scene, K is in bed when a strange man enters his rented room. He turns out to be one of two warders who’ve been sent to arrest him; and although they can’t produce a warrant, they are confident that the “high authorities” they serve have made no mistake. The warders confiscate his nightshirt and underwear (which, they make clear, they will keep for themselves) and eat his breakfast. K is then called into the room of the absent Fraülein Brüstner, another lodger with whom he is barely acquainted, where an inspector sits at her desk, and three clerks from the bank where K works are going through her photographs.
These functionaries claim to know nothing about his case, not even whether he has been charged with an offense, and they seem quite bored with their work. The whole time, some neighbors watch K with intense curiosity from their windows. Kafka thus describes a society in which corruption is blatant, warrantless detentions are routine, and there is no expectation of privacy—a situation that K has evidently been conditioned to accept, judging from his feeble protests.
Scapegoating is an equal opportunity activity; a glance at social media makes it clear that anyone can participate, anyone can be targeted.
Yet K himself exploits these circumstances in an ugly way. Having missed his weekly visit to a prostitute, and noting his landlady’s gratuitous complaint that she’s seen Brüstner on the street with two different gentlemen, he stays up late waiting for the young woman. Ignoring her protests, he insists on entering her room on the pretext of reenacting the way the inspector commandeered her quarters. To her dismay, he awakens the landlady’s nephew when he shouts “Joseph K!” as the inspector had. When she insists that he leave, he suggests that she besmirch her reputation by claiming that he assaulted her while she was alone with him in her room. After she tells him that “I need more than ever to be left in peace,” he kisses the weary and defeated woman on the lips and all over her face. We are later told that K “knew that Fraülein Brüstner was an ordinary little typist who could not resist him for long.” Kafka could hardly be clearer: moved, perhaps, by some mimetic instinct, K violates the peace and privacy of his relatively powerless neighbor, doing to her what the officers of the court did to him.
Indeed, victim and victimizer, court and society, are virtually indistinguishable in The Trial. A preliminary inquiry into K’s case takes place in a room in a residential building, one of many “high grey tenements inhabited by poor people”; all the court’s offices turn out to be in such buildings and neighborhoods. Finding that the atmosphere in the packed room resembles “a local political meeting,” K proceeds to grandstand, playing the role of defender of the people against an unjust system. He tells the examining magistrate that the proceedings are “only a trial if I recognize it as such”; declares that “I take up my stand” for “other people”; and, elated at the “breathless attention” of his audience, claims to have uncovered a “great organization” that persecutes innocent persons. But he storms out of the hearing when he discovers that everyone in the room is wearing the same badges as the magistrate. It seems that the court reflects, and probably inflames, the inquisitorial and punitive passions of the public.
The painter who depicts Justice later tells K that even the debauched, depraved girls who eavesdrop outside his door belong to the court—for “everything belongs to the court.” That arguably includes K, whose complaint about the thieving warders earns them a seemingly endless whipping in a storage closet at his bank—a punishment that, one complains, destroys his prospects for promotion to the rank of whipper, and which K covers up to protect his own career. Little wonder that The Trial’s gloomy rooms thick with smoke, where low ceilings force people to bend their knees and bow their heads as if in shame, give the impression of a society polluted by universal guilt.
What, then, is the court? The great difficulty of interpreting Kafka stems from the fact that the experience of his protagonists is as fluid and obscure as a dream. Dreams are intrinsically underdetermined and ambiguous; even to recount one is to give its vaporous evanescence a spurious definiteness. To be sure, the court reflects the modern administrative state’s impersonality, inaccessibility, and bureaucratic compartmentalization, just as its fickleness—it might acquit a defendant and rearrest him the same day—captures something of that shapeshifting, media-driven abstraction, the public. But the state and the public are merely partial manifestations of the mysterious depths at the heart of The Trial.
Two related features of dreams nevertheless offer clues to the interpretation of The Trial. Dreams give free play to extremes of anger, hatred, fear, and sexual desire that are ordinarily kept in check during waking hours. What is more, the dreamer usually accepts without question circumstances and events that reveal themselves to be contradictory and absurd in the light of wakeful reflection. That’s because the logic of dreams is that of what Sigmund Freud called “the it” (das Es, the id): the basement of the psyche where its rawest impulses lurk. As everyone knows, facts, contradictions, and rational arguments are irrelevant to someone in the grip of a great passion; and societies in which they cease to matter have entered the realm of delusion and nightmare.
I suggest that the court, whose operations are notably opaque and contradictory, symbolizes any organization which, by maintaining a veneer of liberality and procedural, rule-bound rationality around a core of primal aggression, convinces people to accept the logic of dreams. K is free to go about his normal activities after his arrest, a degree of leniency that might be confused for admirable broad-mindedness. Then, too, the court has the appearance of a rational organization: its structure is hierarchical and bureaucratic, in accordance with modern management science. Regrettably, there are mistakes, and even some corruption, at the lower levels; but acknowledging these facts merely highlights the scrupulousness of the higher ones. A similar strategy is now followed by all sorts of organizations—political parties, media outlets, human rights watchdogs, international bodies, NGOs—that claim to be champions of justice, yet disgracefully omit facts and countenance blatant inconsistencies so that they may stoke animosity toward their preferred scapegoats. And today, their favorite targets are Israel and the Jews.
In the painter’s depiction, Justice has wings; it is in motion. Instead of standing still, it becomes “social justice”—Justice as social and political activism. In this guise, it merges with the goddess of Victory, because it is concerned with achieving goals that are incidental to its proper work of distinguishing right from wrong in each case that comes before it. But it must still maintain legal formalities that constrain its impulses; it must provide arguments that ground its decisions and findings in the law. The final stage, the transformation of Justice into the goddess of the Hunt, occurs when it is possible to abandon these trappings of reason altogether—when naked aggression needs no justification.
Kafka’s image of the metamorphosis of Justice captures the progression of antisemitism in the Internet age. Universities had been seedbeds of leftist activism for decades, and after the death of George Floyd in 2020, cultural institutions and corporations also began to promote racial equity, economic and environmental “justice,” trans rights, and a host of other causes. After the Hamas pogrom of 2023, these merged into an omnicause, in which the plight of the Palestinians assumed a leading role. Anti-Zionism exploded on campuses and among the young.
These developments have opened the floodgates to visceral Jew-hatred that is immune to refutation because it is packaged as entertainment. Politically extreme Internet streamers have monetized praise of Hitler and Holocaust denial by attracting millions of viewers who are thrilled by the mockery of moral norms as “pearl-clutching.” Social media algorithms that maximize user engagement on platforms like TikTok feed endless streams of “rage bait” rants and cartoonish, AI-generated videos of Jews and swastikas to anyone who clicks on similar content. Even worse, troll farms and AI bots create an illusion of broad popular consensus by filling the comment sections on such videos with approving remarks from nonexistent users: good-looking, ordinary American mothers and fathers who are concerned with what the Jews are doing to their country. As Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin have documented in their article “The Death of History,” young people are being memed into Jew-hatred, one 5-to-7 second clip at a time. And just like that, the oldest and ugliest hatred is made to look not only young and beautiful, but patriotic and cool.
In condemning the whole wretched reality it describes, the novel offers only a literary solution to the problem of thinly disguised aggression.
Does Kafka wish to suggest that K is a Jew? Kafka never uses the word “Jew” in his published fiction, but would it not be like him to indicate a central issue by an absence—by what is not said? There are, in any case, a few possible clues to K’s identity. He is arrested on his 30th birthday and executed on the eve of his 31st, which seems to connect his trial with attributes he inherited at birth—who he is, not what he’s done. The defendants K sees in the offices of the court “obviously belonged to the upper classes”; like K, a banker who “was in full career and rapidly becoming a rival even to the assistant manager,” most of Prague’s Jews during Kafka’s lifetime were ethnically German, middle- and upper-class professionals. But the most suggestive evidence concerning K’s identity is his resemblance to another, more famous Joseph.
The first thing the Bible tells us about Joseph is that he tended the flock with his brothers and “brought ill report of them to their father,” which some commentators take to mean that he slandered them. Joseph incites the hatred of his brothers by relating dreams in which they bow down to him, and they repay him by throwing him in a pit. Sold as a slave in Egypt to Potiphar, whose wife slanders him after he refuses to sleep with her. Pharaoh later takes him from prison and makes him his prime minister; in that office, he cleverly uses a great famine to consolidate the state’s power, stripping the Egyptians of silver, land, and livestock and turning them into pharaoh’s sharecroppers.
Like his biblical namesake, K is inclined obtusely to lord it over others. The Trial’s first sentence reads: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K, for without having done anything evil, he was arrested one morning.” Maybe so, but he himself is not above stooping to calumny: that very evening, he forces himself on Brüstner and proposes, with Potipharian presumption, that she slander herself. Like Joseph, K has sexual charisma; a washerwoman offers herself to him, and his lawyer explains that merely being accused makes men attractive to women. He is arrogant in his dealings with the court, just as Joseph was before his brothers. Like Joseph, he is an ambitious and capable administrator who boasts to his landlady of his importance at the bank, where he is chief clerk. And like Joseph, he incurs the strong animosity of the family he has; his uncle and onetime guardian harshly reproaches him for destroying his prospects by leaving a meeting of the chief clerk of the court to have sex with his lawyer’s mistress.
If K is a Jew, he is (like Kafka) an assimilated one, existing between two peoples—Czech-speaking Catholics and Yiddish-speaking Jews—and an outsider to both, much like Joseph in Egypt. And if his being a Jew figures in the court’s decision to single him out, K would, through his work at the bank, have aided and abetted the society that persecutes him based on the very identity he has rejected. The Trial would then be marked by something like the irony we see in the story of Joseph, who uses his energies to benefit the Israelites’ future oppressors—except that the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt was part of God’s plan for His chosen people, while in K’s case, the irony is purely tragic.
But why would Kafka shroud the question of K’s Jewishness in fog? Perhaps because doing so makes it more difficult to dismiss his premise of universal guilt. By enticing readers to try to ferret out an identity that K has deliberately or thoughtlessly disavowed, Kafka implicates them in the sordid work of the court—or, what is the same thing, of a nosy and suspicious public, whose sheer, anonymous mass makes its opinion the weightiest of all. And while “Jew” is an all-too-common value of x in the not-so-innocent question “Is s/he an x?”, it is by no means the only one. Scapegoating is an equal-opportunity activity; a glance at social media makes it clear that anyone can participate, anyone can be targeted.
What is to be done when bloodlust becomes socially acceptable? Thanks to social media and AI, that historically recurrent question has now returned with new urgency. The only solution Ferguson and Levin can think of is somehow to overcome our “wrathful impulses,” “short attention spans,” and addiction to “flattering lies”—something K couldn’t manage, even when his life depended on it. The Trial leaves us with little hope that we will be able to do so, not least because, in condemning the whole wretched reality it describes, the novel offers only a literary solution to the problem of thinly disguised aggression. For in the last analysis, Kafka’s writings are one great moral ledger; and when it comes to settling accounts, Der Prozess is the punishment.
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