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In this season of the “holidays,” it was announced several days ago that Fairfax County schools would be permitted to install video surveillance cameras in High Schools. Fairfax County is frequently lauded as being one of the best public school counties in the nation, but, as residents of the county, we receive regular updates of various assaults, thefts, “gang-banging” and near-riots taking place in the High Schools.

A civilization reveals its deepest commitments through its education – enculturation – of its young. We have whitewashed not only God and religion from the schools, but all questions of the Good in favor of a embrace of relativist toleration and non-judgmentalism, along with an ethic of entitlement, self-realization, and a utilitarian view of education. It has been argued since the beginning of the liberal era that the “bracketing” of questions of the Good would result in civil peace and toleration.

Instead – as Thomas Hobbes told us – we increasingly live within a surveillance State, an all-seeing Leviathan. In lieu of self-sustaining standards of respect, modesty, manners and maturity, we are surrounded by evidence of cultural pollution, social dissolution and irresponsibility. Into the breach fills the State to enforce by diktat what social decencies once governed.

This is the consequence of several centuries of the liberal vision of toleration and peace in place of God and Good – our children “surveilled” where instead they should be gaining deeper understanding and practices of adulthood and even the beginnings of wisdom. But, do not mention the name God or say “Merry Christmas” – that might cause discomfort. Better to turn our schools into panopticons, our children into inmates.

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Until one of us finds the time to slap down Joe Carter’s attack on distributism (as Rod Dreher called upon us to do), I’ll direct our good readers to a searing post by Thaddeus Kozinski.

One small-owner money quote:

Robert Nisbet, in his prophetic The Quest for Community, makes clear the modern nation-state’s tendency to transform the manifold, pre-and-supra-state, mediating loci of economic and political authority (local community, guild, union, kinship relations, church, university, etc.) into nothing more than private factions with no authority and power in the public sphere. What is left are only individuals and the coercive apparatus of the state, with the in-between, politically, culturally, and economically powerless. The contemporary nation-state of America is a public-interest alliance pretending to be a common-good polis; it forbids genuine, non-alliance polises within its boundaries to have any share in governing authority and autonomy. All polises but the mega-polis-alliance thus are privatized and depoliticized. Only in private “civil society” can citizens pursue real goods and organize their lives around them, but it is always civil society under the state’s rule, which is becoming more and more totalitarian.

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I received the latest issue of the essential journal The New Atlantis yesterday, and was honored once again to appear in its pages. The essay in question – entitled “The Science of Politics and the Conquest of Nature” – is extensively based upon a lecture I delivered as part of Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra’s “Stuck With Virtue” conference. My essay appears as one of a number of papers that were presented at that conference.

In the article, I argue that “transhumanists” make many political assumptions that their own scientific assumptions disallow. They argue that we can rely upon liberal democracy to avoid the threat of state-sponsored eugenics that was pursued during the first great wave of euphoria over the prospect of biological self-transformation. Their rejection of a “human nature” thus disallows them from the easy assumption that liberal democracy will persist.

I argue in my article that we can see a close connection between the assumptions about the science of man and the science of nature that informed, respectively, ancient and early-modern thought. In the case of the ancients, the natural world was an object for contemplation and understanding, while the human world – noteworthy for the fact of human liberty – required extensive consideration of how humans were to act given the fact of human freedom and the boundaries of nature (including human nature). Their conclusion was that humans required an extensive education in virtue, in order to understand their appropriate use (and the potential abuse) of their freedom.

The early-moderns instead begin by assuming that humans are, like the planets, predictable. Human motivation consists exclusively of desire (for pleasure) and fear (of pain). On that basis, a secure and predictable political system can be built – liberalism. The hard discipline of virtue (or self-limitation) is unnecessary; instead, a new scientific project is proposed, one that aims at the mastery of nature to the end of fulfilling desires and lessening harms. Science becomes the effort to conquer nature for the relief of the human estate.

Inasmuch as transhumanists hold not only that the natural world, but human nature itself, is subject to our mastery and transformation, then they would break the link between the fixed view of human nature and the liberal political project that follows upon it. Yet, they insist that we can continue to rely upon the persistence of liberal institutions and belief that will thwart the effort to pursue inegalitarian and potential cruel outcomes. I conclude the article by arguing that they grant themselves a set of political beliefs that their scientific approach does not necessarily permit them:

[The assurances of the liberal-minded transhumanists sound] well and good — but on what basis can it be assumed that liberal political institutions will remain relevant or applicable to a creature that we do not yet know we will become? What sense can we make of appeals to our “democratic traditions” when those traditions rest on a fundamentally different set of anthropological assumptions? Liberal forms and institutions are the consequence of a particular scientific and political understanding, one that would be fundamentally altered by a neo-Darwinian transformation. Unlike the ancient or modern views I’ve described, this new understanding aims at the fundamental alteration of humanity itself. How can it be predicted or assumed in advance that political institutions and practices derived from a pre-transhumanist scientific and political understanding will continue to apply or be regarded as relevant? Is it not just as likely that our future selves will come to regard the liberal regime as even more of an antiquated curiosity than we now regard the city-state? For all of the futurism of the neo-Darwinians, when it comes to their political assumptions, they reveal themselves to be utter nostalgists, clinging to a provincial form of belief that is utterly unjustified and unwarranted by their own scientific assumptions.

Neo-Darwinians often resort to explaining our social condition as the result of a long process of social evolution, which gave us the capacity to cooperate with strangers and eventually to establish institutions and behaviors that permit increasingly global forms of governance. Thus, Simon Young argues, “diversity and cooperation have evolved because they increase our ability to survive.” The confidence of various transhumanists in the ability of liberal institutions to resist any authoritarian or inegalitarian outcomes arising from an enhancement regime seems to derive from a belief in the continuation of this evolutionary trend. But if humans are now going to actively alter our very composition, to what extent can we have confidence that the institutions and processes that have developed by a very different evolutionary track, for very different creatures, will not be regarded as fundamentally disposable? Again, the assumptions about a liberal future seem to be more a matter of faith than science.

Finally, further and deeper reflection on the sedimentation of our various political traditions ought to give pause. The most thoughtful liberals — perhaps above all, Tocqueville — recognized that liberalism contained an internal logic that threatened its own self-destruction. The anthropological individualism at the heart of its theory could be given institutional credence so long as those assumptions did not colonize every aspect of human life. Liberalism rested fundamentally on pre-modern and pre-liberal institutions and practices, ranging from family to community, from church to civil society. In spite of the official rejection of the pre-modern tradition, liberalism assumed and benefited from a kind of “unofficial” continuity of the pre-modern, Aristotelian-inflected inheritance. Thus, Tocqueville observed, though Americans justified their actions in terms of self-interest, they continued to act altruistically. He wrote that “they would rather do honor to their philosophy than to themselves.”

The proposed new scientific settlement would introduce an even thinner human anthropology. In this view, humanity is reduced largely to physical bodies that seek life and health. Families, where they make an appearance, are generally composed of parents who seek to enhance their children. Society is envisioned as composed of near-immortal autonomous individuals who pursue their own ends, forever.

Ironically enough, transhumanism gains a great deal of its persuasive and intuitive force from its reliance upon our widespread experience of self-sacrificial parental love. We are asked, who would not want to prevent a child from being born with a terrible disease? And what parents don’t want to give their children every advantage in life, whether SAT preparation, or, if it comes to it, genetic enhancement?

Yet the motivation of transhumanism is finally selfish: each of us wants, or should want, to live forever in a condition of perfect health and expanded faculties. What then becomes of the relationship between the generations? In a world of limited resources, space, and opportunity, would not the next generation now be experienced as a threat? Would not every inclination cry out against reproduction? Would not our experience of humanity as generational creatures, bound ceaselessly in relationship to the past and to the future, cease to be a fact of our existence?

I invite you to read the whole thing, and to visit the symposium at the New Atlantis website.

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I will be lecturing tomorrow, Thursday, November 17 at the University of Texas at Austin. My lecture is entitled “Why Great Books?” and is being sponsored by the Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas.

I described my talk as follows:

It is often assumed that the content of the Great Books can sufficiently justify their study. What if this is not the case? Could it be that some Great Books are responsible for the decline of the study of Great Books? Is it possible the idea of “greatness” is itself a problem for Great Books? In this lecture, a case will be made instead for “Modest Books.”

Austin-area readers are warmly invited. 4 p.m. in UTC 3.124.

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

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

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

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I’ll be in The City of the Big Shoulders this Thursday and Friday, October 13-14, both to attend and to participate in a conference at the University of Chicago honoring and reflecting on the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain. While I greatly admire Jean, I will be offering a critique of her effort to defend the liberal order with just enough pre- and non-liberal institutions to keep the creaky structure from falling apart (finally not enough for so inherently creaky a structure). My title: “Defending the Indefensible: Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Tragic Defense of the Liberal Consensus.”

From Chicago I’ll make pilgrimage to the University of Notre Dame, where I’ll be a participant at the annual meeting of the Association of Political Theory. I’ll be appearing on Saturday, October 15th at 11 a.m. on a roundtable that will consider the merits (or lack thereof) of Martha Nussbaum’s most recent book, Not For Profit. While I’m still formulating thoughts, I can say with confidence that while I agree with Nussbaum that the humanities are deserving of defense, I will disagree almost entirely with grounds on which she seeks to defend them.

So, into the heartland, God’s country. Come by and say hello if you’re in the neighborhood, and so inclined.

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Our friend Phillip Blond returns to the U.S., landing first in Washington, D.C., where he will join me tomorrow evening, Thursday October 6 for a “conversation” about his recent work, his take on the current political and economic situation, his efforts to establish an American branch of his think-tank ResPublica, and anything else we and the audience decide to talk about. If you’re in the area, join us in Copley Formal Lounge on the Georgetown campus at 8 p.m. More information can be found on the Tocqueville Forum website. We were Phillip’s host for his first visit to the U.S., and he arrived with aplomb, greeted by an admiring column by David Brooks and a marvelous turnout at his several appearances.

On next Tuesday, October 11th, Phillip will continue his conversation on the campus of The Catholic University of America, where he will be joined by Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and the political theorist William Galston. Information about his appearance at CUA is available here.

On October 14th, Phillip will speak at New York University at the Kimmel Center from 4-5:30. Information here.

And, in what I believe will be his first midwest appearance, Blond will speak on the campus of Michigan State University on October 17th. The title of his talk will be “The Broken Society vs. The Big Society.” Information here.

In all these talks, Blond will continue to develop some of his key insights that he powerfully articulated in his 2009 article “The Rise of the Red Tories,” where he wrote:

Look at the society we have become: we are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. The intermediary structures of a civilised life have been eliminated, and with them the Burkean ideal of a civic, religious, political or social middle, as the state and the market accrue power at the expense of ordinary people. But if both 20th-century socialism and conservatism have converged on the market state, they have done so by obeying the insistent dictates of modernity itself. And modernity is nothing if not liberal….

Conservatives who believe in value, culture and truth should therefore think twice before calling themselves liberal. Liberalism can only be a virtue when linked to a politics of the common good, a problem which the best liberals—Mill, Adam Smith and Gladstone—recognised but could never resolve. A vision of the good life cannot come from liberal principles. Unlimited liberalism produces atomised relativism and state absolutism. Insofar as both the Tories and Labour have been contaminated by liberalism, the true left-right legacy of the postwar period is, unsurprisingly, a centralised authoritarian state and a fragmented and disassociative society.

A recording of my conversation with Blond will be available in a number of days at the website of the Tocqueville Forum. But, for those in the vicinity of any of these talks, I hope you’ll consider coming out to what I am quite certain will be a riveting and energizing set of conversations and lectures.

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…is the title of a new multi-author volume edited by Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. I was one of the initial reviewers of the book, and found it to be a rich, vital and essential exploration of the idea, history, and practice of thrift in America. The book has a rather amazing line-up of authors, from historians to sociologists to economists to theologians (my suggestion that they include a political theorist was obviously ignored!), including Daniel Walker Howe, Deirdre McCloskey, Joyce Appleby, T.J. Jackson Lears, James Davison Hunter, and Robert Frank, among many others. While the book has the usual downside of a multi-author volume, it benefits from a comprehensive treatment that would not have been otherwise available – both historically, tracing through the idea of thrift throughout the history of America, as well as across a variety of fields of study.

What a number of the essays point out is that the abandonment of thrift required a revolution in thinking about our relationship to material goods. An industry (advertising, but also industrial production more widely) actively inculcated a felt sense of need for certain objects where earlier any such purchase would have been regarded as extravagence (just watch an episode of “The Waltons” for a remembered version of such thrift.)

A part of the story that should also be told was offered in a wonderful lecture at this weekend’s FPR conference on “Human Scale and the Human Good.” David Cloutier – a professor of Theology at Mt. St. Mary’s College – offered an extremely thought-provoking lecture on the transformation of the concept of “luxury” from its classical to its modern meaning. Cloutier not only pointed out that the word “luxury” went from having a negative to a positive set of connotations, but that it came largely to mean items that are expensive or rare. According to a more ancient understanding, however, “luxury” includes not only expensive items, but the effort to accumulate goods that are extraneous and unnecessary, as well as any use or employment of items in a way that is wasteful or irresponsible. Thus, he argued, even the purchase of Wal-Mart socks can be considered the purchase of a “luxury” item, particularly in an age in which we no longer repair (or “darn”) worn socks.

The decline of thrift – receiving an excellent treatment in this new book, and a bargain at only $35 for 620 pages – needs also be accompanied by a story of the transformation of the concept of luxury. When the recording of the FPR conference becomes available, I encourage all readers to give Professor Cloutier’s very fine presentation a hearing.

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More reportage, now by Niall Ferguson, of the obviously depressing news – we are raising a nation of idiots.

Half of today’s teenagers don’t read books—except when they’re made to. According to the most recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the proportion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who read a book not required at school or at work is now 50.7 percent, the lowest for any adult age group younger than 75, and down from 59 percent 20 years ago.

I guess the good news is that we should expect the Chinese to overtake us in the near future. We can pin our hopes on creating a planet of idiots.

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Get ready to fall off your seat. Sarah Palin, a.k.a., Flawed Vessel, recently received a bit of positive press in the New York Times. According to the Time’s Anand Giridharadas, Palin’s recent speech in Iowa seemed to show a willingness to take on some sacred cows of Republican Party orthodoxy, and the relatively more silent collusion informing Democratic Party practice – in particular, the cozy relationship between big business and big government. Among her remarkable statements:

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

I found myself thinking about these words as I looked over this chart that a friend sent to me today. If “Ponzi scheme” is the expression of the moment, “money laundering” seems to be a phrase begging to come back into fashion.

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Tonight, September 19, FPR’s own Bill Kauffman will gird up to re-make the case of the Anti-federalists at the Tocqueville Forum‘s annual Constitution Day event. He will be debating Professor Colleen Sheehan of Villanova University, defender of the “consolidators.” It should be a terrific, entertaining and educational evening in which we recall just how contemporary those ancient debates remain. I will serve as moderator.

Readers in the DC area are cordially invited to attend (others will have to wait for the recording). Join us at 7 p.m. in the Copley Formal Lounge on the campus of Georgetown University. More information here.

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Dreher, that is, with a new blog at The American Conservative website. Congratulations to both, and especially all of us, who have missed his voice over the past year. We’ll be working to get him to write over here on occasion as well – there’s always been a nice rocking chair ready for Rod on the Porch.

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From Pope Benedict XVI’s Address to Young University Professors:

“Where will young people encounter those reference points in a society which is increasingly confused and unstable? At times one has the idea that the mission of a university professor nowadays is exclusively that of forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor at any given time. One also hears it said that the only thing that matters at the present moment is pure technical ability. This sort of utilitarian approach to education is in fact becoming more widespread, even at the university level, promoted especially by sectors outside the University. All the same, you who, like myself, have had an experience of the University, and now are members of the teaching staff, surely are looking for something more lofty and capable of embracing the full measure of what it is to be human. We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the University, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity.”

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