Down With the Techies

I'm generally not a fan of Peter Lawler's writing as he's too much of a nationalist and a Straussian but he's probably correct in his judgment here: Silicon Valley: Trashing the Liberal Arts

Walter Berns

Is he really someone for paleos to hold up as a teacher?

Country Before Faith by Gerald J. Russello
A constitutional scholar’s conscientious objection to the culture war

Anglo? He sounds like someone who grew up on the nationalist mythos.

His concern over the court’s involvement in cases touching on religious conviction had an unforeseen personal effect. In 1997, he resigned from the board of First Things over a symposium on the possibility of judicial tyranny. Some of the contributors to the symposium questioned whether because of cases like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the United States could be considered still to have a legitimate government of, by, and for the people rather than what Russell Kirk elsewhere called “archonocracy,” or rule by judges. Berns, a World War II veteran, would have none of it. He wrote to the editors, “You do not speak for me… when you say that the government of the United State is morally illegitimate and come close to advocating not only civil disobedience but armed revolution.”

Berns knew from revolution: at Cornell in 1969 he was one of the few faculty who refused to bow to radical student demands, which cost him his post. But his reaction to the symposium is informative. The Supreme Court’s extension of its religious “logic” had created too many holes in the fabric of the polity. While other religious conservatives, myself included, rejoiced in the resistance to the “naked public square,” Berns lamented that it also meant the disintegration of a nation founded explicitly on the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, with religious freedom coming second to citizenship, an argument he elaborated on in his masterful 2001 book Making Patriots.

A Guide to the Work of Walter Berns
NYT: Walter Berns, Whose Ideas Fueled Neoconservative Movement, Dies at 95
Weekly Standard obituary and tribute
Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa
Spectator
Kirk Center
OLL
NEH

Peter Lawler Responds to George Will

A Defense of Downton’s Nostalgia - referring to something he wrote for ISI.

Aristocrats had relational virtues—a clear sense of the connection between privileges and responsibilities—that we don’t. When it comes to money and justice, however, we middle-class democrats know better. Astute nostalgia is always self-consciously selective. The model of that kind of analytic use of nostalgia is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which is full of aristocratic criticisms of democracy and democratic criticisms of aristocracy.

On Downton Abbey, we see that the way of life of the relational place is being improved by middle-class, American, Irish, socialist, and even proto-feminist contributions, but usually not at the expense of “class” in the sense of knowing who you are and what you’re supposed to do. Who can deny that today our upper class—our meritocratic cognitive elite—lacks and could benefit from some of the class of the Earl of Grantham and his family? That’s not to deny that the Lord Grantham is not so astute when it comes to the personal longing for freedom, turning a profit, tolerance of religious diversity, modern science, and even good government. He is astute enough, though, to accept, if reluctantly, changes that will make his way of life more sustainable and even admirable. He is also astute enough not to embrace the popular moralism that turns sins into crimes or even reasons for dismissal.

When the difference is not between aristocracy and bourgeoisie but between one form of oligarchy and another form of oligarchy, then Lawler misunderstands the "virtues" embodied by people like Lord Grantham. A rigid notion of place that is based on landed wealth and an inherited title that may have some connection with responsibility but little with desert (justice) is not the sort of "place" any republican would seek to uphold - nor any true aristocrat. Is a true aristocracy, one based on merit and distributive justice, impossible to have in this world? Can we be only content with a counterfeit, or worse, a counterfeit form of a republic? There may be those who romanticize the British class system, but I have no time for it.

Illiberal Catholicism

John Zmirak, Illberal Catholicism

Thought about it, but I won't be wading into this discussion...

Rejecting Zmirak’s Rejection of ‘Illiberal Catholicism’ by Andrew Haines
Illiberal Catholicism, the Moral Self, and the Political Community by Aaron Taylor
Discussion of Zmirak's piece at WWWTW.

Related:
Liberalism is a Sin
CDK, On Tolerance, the Benignity of the Christian
Why are U.S. conservatives so obsessed with monarchies?
Tocqueville on Keeping Our Countercultural Churches

Love and Limits

Love, Justice, and God by Peter Lawler

Nature intends us, so to speak, to be social animals concerned with perpetuating ourselves, our genetic material. Genetic perpetuation, for animals such as ourselves, depend on experiencing ourselves as parts of wholes greater than ourselves. But such wholes can only be so big. There's no evolutionary reason to imagine that our empathy could or should expand to include billions of people. So "universal love" and "universal brotherhood" are impossible. All men and women are not, in fact, brothers and sisters.

Is he speaking for himself, or giving an argument? Empathy is not the same as love, nor is it identical to friendship. One should acknowledge that there is a limit to the number of close friends one can have, though this does not mean that we cannot love (an act of the will) all. (Though we are not required to do so equally.) If tribalism merely refers to the tribe as a form of social organization in preference to the modern nation-state, it does not entail hatred of the other, or injustice.

Peter Lawler Responds to AmCon and Rod Dreher

Conservatives American and Crunchy
The follow-up post (which focuses on Rod Dreher): Big Idea: Being Crunchy and Conservative These Days

Rod Dreher's blog post: Individualism Uber Alles