At Values and Capitalism, Josh Good offers Paul Ryan a great line; I hope he takes it. Josh notes that Ryan’s Medicare plan exempts today’s seniors from the impact of reforms. So when the 69-year-old Biden attacks the 42-year-old Ryan over Medicare in the VP debate, Ryan can tell him: “I’m not talking about you, Joe. I’m talking about me.” If it were me, I’d put it this way: “We’re going to take care of you, Joe, but we’re also going to save the system so it’s there for me, too.”

The whole post is worth reading. Josh highlights the theme of generosity in Ann Romney’s speech:

[Mitt's decision to] work harder and press on … [has] given us the deep satisfaction of being able to help others in ways that we could never have imagined. Mitt doesn’t like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point.

And we’re no different than the millions of Americans who quietly help their neighbors, their churches and their communities… They don’t do it so that others will think more of them. They do it because there is no greater joy. “Give and it shall be given unto you.”…

This is the genius of America: dreams fulfilled help others launch new dreams.

Josh comments: “This is a big, important point—one that stands at the center of this year’s election.” He’s right. Josh writes at length about the Romneys’ philanthropy, but there’s an even bigger issue in play here.

What does America believe about its free enterprise system? Do we believe the function of free enterprise is to make us rich so we can gratify our selfish desires? Or do we believe the function of free enterprise is moral–that it allows us to become the kind of people who have the deep satisfaction of earning our own success by serving others and making the world a better place for everyone? (more…)

World magazine breaks the story about conservative Christians who view David Barton of Wallbuilders as an embarrassment. The focus of the current controversy is Barton’s new book on Jefferson. My friend Jay Richards doesn’t mince words; he says this book and Barton’s other books and videos are full of “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”

I’m not a scholar of Thomas Jefferson, but I am a scholar of John Locke. Barton has an article about Locke on his website, so I thought I’d weigh in with my opinion on whether it matches Jay’s description of Barton’s methods. It does, and then some.

I should note for the record that I’m not only a conservative (both theologically, as an evangelical, and politically, as a Republican) but one with a track record of defending Locke against claims that he was a deist or that his philosophy is antithetical to Christianity. As providence would have it, just over a week ago I published an article on how Locke’s Reasonableness helped me come to faith in Jesus Christ.

Yet Barton’s attempt to fit Locke into his larger historical narrative forces him into numerous distortions. Moreover, the article contains a number of incidental facutal errors that don’t even advance his thesis, indicating that his inability to write reliable history stretches beyond ideological cheerleading and into outright incompetence.

Specifically: (more…)

Don’t miss this post at The Atlantic by senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta (brought to you by First Links). Mainstream intellectuals continue to make really admirable progress up the learning curve:

What if the goal of women’s equality within the American political system is partly dependent on the persistence of marriage as an institution here?…The problem for women’s political power is that unmarried mothers turn out at the lowest rate of any group of women, when you divide women by whether they are married and have children…In short, as more and more women become unmarried moms, more mothers will find themselves too pressed to vote…The transformation of motherhood into a non-marital phenomenon — a social practice that at the same time hurts women economically and pulls them away from the political world — could well lead to a decline in political power for mothers, and eventually for all women, since more than 80 percent of women eventually have kids. Given that, it’s hard to see how we get to the world Anne-Marie Slaughter is calling for, where women have more power to influence the governance of their country, and eventually transform the workplace to make it more family friendly.

Check out the whole thing – it’s replete with lightbulb-over-the-head data.

The Atlantic has a history of being in the vanguard on this issue. They published “Dan Quayle Was Right” in 1993, when the point was still all but universally sneered at in their world. The Washington Post finally caught up this May with “20 Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right about Murphy Brown and Unmarried Moms.” Sorry it took them 20 years, but we should welcome them to the party rather than punishing them for doing the right thing! And of course the coup de grace was the New York Times’ lengthy piece last week on how divorce and illegitimacy are driving an increasing economic and social class division.

Could it be that the American cultural elite is taking the first halting steps toward preaching what they practice?

First off, apologies to Robert Miller for having gotten his point not quite right when I restated it in my post.

At the risk of overanalyzing a topic that it is not really edifying to overanalyze (First Thoughts, your one stop shop for hotel porn!) I think it would be fruitful for me to offer the following responses.

1) Miller and Beckwith have both misread my post on one point. I did not say it was a victory that porn use had migrated to a different technological platform. What I said was that this technological change has opened a window of opportunity, if we are smart enough to seize it while it is still open, to score an important victory. We can live in a world where hotel chains phase out porn very slowly and mostly out of the media spotlight, or we can live in a world where hotel chains get rid of porn faster and in a more high-profile way because public opposition to porn accellerated the decision. Which of those two worlds is better for us?

It’s true that you can’t just focus on changing law and institutional policies without changing public opinion. However, you also can’t get much traction on public opinion unless you are fighting to change law and institutional policies. The trick is to pick the right fights.

Focusing public attention on partial-birth abortion was the smartest thing the pro-life movement ever did. We won the legislative fight, but more important, we moved public opinion. We picked a winnable fight and we won it. The subsequent fate of the law in the courts didn’t take that movement of public opinion away.

Steve Forbes summarized the strategy: “You can only change the law by changing the culture, and the way to change the culture is to change the law a little bit at a time.” That’s oversimplified – to change culture you need to be doing a lot of other things besides just changing the law (or in this case hotel policy). But picking the right fights on policy is not optional; you can’t change culture without it.

2) The debate over the basis of democratic capitalism is an old one. Readers of Miller’s post may get the impression that I didn’t engage the question of whether democratic capitalism produces authentic human flourishing by design or only by accidental tendency. But I did: “Democracy is right because it does a better job than the alternatives of cultivating authentic human good in the polity. Capitalism is right because it does a better job than the alternative (note the singular) of cultivating authentic human good in the economy. That they do so is not an accidental by-product; this is their only justification for existing. No one should believe in them for any other reason” (emphasis added).

We’re not going to rehash the entire debate between teleological and deontological approaches to social ethics here on First Thoughts. But I wonder if Miller would be willing to satisfy my curiosity on one question. If democratic capitalism is not designed to produce human flourishing, on what basis is it designed?

Last week, after carrying the text of an open letter from Robert George and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf calling upon the hotel industry to quit offering porn, Public Discourse ran a response from Robert Miller. Miller is in sympathy with the project, but offers three reasons why he thinks this is probably a fight not worth picking. Hotels won’t want to do it because porn brings in too much money. Even if they did want to do it, they’d be sued by shareholder activists for failing to maximize profit. The hotels would deserve to win such suits, but it’s not clear they would. And even if they fought off the lawsuits, shareholders seeking profits would organize to replace the hotel boards that got rid of porn with new boards that would bring it back.

There’s one really big problem with Miller’s arguments: His information on the profitability of hotel porn is out of date. Two of America’s largest hotel chains – Marriott and Omni - have already made the decision to drop porn. Marriott did so just this year. Due to technological changes, revenues from hotel porn have been collapsing:

The [Marriott] hotel chain says the decision is strictly based on economics: In-room porn profits have steadily declined because the porn industry has moved online. Hotels in general have seen business travelers bring in their own electronic entertainment in the form of DVDs or movies they can watch on their laptops (like videos from Netflix). According to Colliers PKF Hospitality Research, hotels now collect about 39 percent less for in-room pay-per-view movie rentals than they did a decade ago.

The technological trends are only going to continue moving in this direction. This is a fight we can win.

By fighting it, we can greatly hasten the process. Technological change is only going to eat away at hotel porm relatively slowly. Let’s raise the costs of being on the wrong side.

This is a fight very much worth winning. The anti-porn cause desperately needs a win. We’ve been fighting too many losing battles. This is a very smart play. It’s the equivalent of going after partial-birth abortion.

It’s also worth winning this fight in order to establish that the market is moral. Miller is dead wrong when he writes that ”the legal institutions of a democratic and capitalist society are not designed to give people what is good and prevent them from getting what is bad; they are designed to give people what they want and not give them what they don’t want.” If I believed that, I wouldn’t believe in either democracy or capitalism. Democracy is right because it does a better job than the alternatives of cultivating authentic human good in the polity. Capitalism is right because it does a better job than the alternative (note the singular) of cultivating authentic human good in the economy. That they do so is not an accidental by-product; this is their only justification for existing. No one should believe in them for any other reason.

Miller writes that no court has yet tested the question of whether companies can refrain from maximizing profit for ethical considerations. That’s a legal fight we not only should win, but probably would win. Even Milton Friedman, the key intellectual defender of the proposition that (in his words) the only social responsibility of a company is to maximize profit, added that they had a responsibility to do so within the law and also within the prevailing ethical norms of society. Now, I think the social responsibility of a company is not to maximize profit but to serve customers. But if even Milton Friedman is with us on this, we can win it.

Today’s Slate carries a retrospective on Judith Wallerstein, who died last month, by her professional collaborator Sandra Blakeslee. Wallerstein was one of the first social scientists to study the impact of divorce on children.

Blakeslee opens with a fascinating vignette on how Wallerstein first looked into researching divorce because an encounter with a friend of her daughter’s convinced her that the impact of divorce might be both minor and transient. This was the first generation of children raised with liberalized divorce laws, and it looked to Wallerstein like they were going to make the adjustment reasonably well.

That theory didn’t survive its enounters with the data. Here’s how Blakeslee summarizes the findings of Wallerstein’s life’s work:

• The effects of divorce on children are not transient. They are long-lasting and profound, persisting well into adulthood.
• The quality of the post-divorce family is critical. Parents are told “don’t fight” but the issue is much bigger. Beyond custody and visiting plans, children need to be fully supported as they grow up. Few are.
• Age matters. Little ones, ages 2 to 6, are terrified of abandonment. Elementary-school-age children, 7 to 11, grow resentful when deprived of opportunities they would have had if their parents had stayed together. Preadolescents, ages 11 and 12, can be seduced by what Judy called “the voices of the street.” Many teenagers, taking on the role of parent, become overburdened.
• Stepfamilies are laden with land mines that no one sees coming.

You knew all that already, of course. But Wallerstein didn’t, and she followed the data. As a social scientist myself, I can tell you, that’s a lot harder than it sounds when you actually have to do it – even when your findings don’t scandalize your peers and damage your career!

Yet today, these findings aren’t scandalous any more. The boundaries can move. Good, sound science like Wallerstein did is part of what helps move them. In spite of social science’s track record, I’m increasingly convinced it’s going to be a more and more constructive contributor to the sum of human wisdom in the century ahead. And on no human subject is wisdom more needed than on this one. Check out the Slate piece.

Maggie Gallagher’s blog is called Culture War Victory Fund. But what would it mean to “win” the culture war? Her essay on David Blankenhorn shows how urgent it is for us to reexamine this question.

I owe a lot to Maggie Gallagher. I’ve only met her once, and that was brief. But I was glad that it gave me the chance to tell her that The Abolition of Marriage hit me like a bolt of lightning, not so much a book as a life-changing event. It revolutionized my thinking about this whole issue – and many others as well, because many of the key lessons she taught me on marriage were transferrable to other major public controversies.

Now I owe her again, because her essay on David Blankenhorn hit me in much the same way. (If you haven’t read it yet, drop whatever you’re doing and read it. We’ll wait.)

I come to this conversation as a topical “insider” but a relational “outsider.” I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the marriage issue, (more…)

Obviously we’ve all been thinking a lot lately about Tocqueville’s problem of the democratic state recognizing no other institutions as roughly coequal sources of social legitimacy and power. Society needs what Neuhaus and Berger called “mediating institutions” that preserve some social space between the state and the individual. Alone against the state, the naked individual has no hope–so much so that the will of the state becomes identified with the general good and the individual ceases even to be able to think in terms where resistance could be legitimate.

There’s one passage in Tocqueville that puts this issue in stark relief. Tocqueville points out that in the old European aristocracies, the minor nobility used to serve as zones of relative resistance to the king. The princes and dukes and whatnot would collect around them, in their households and social spheres, all the people who were out of favor with the king. Tocqueville was worried because in a democracy, while there were many mediating institutions worthy of celebration (the family, the church, voluntary associations, etc.) there were no institutions of the same kind as the state that nonetheless stood apart from the state, as a duke holds a station of the same kind as a king yet stands apart from him.

Why does “of the same kind” matter? Because that’s what prevents the big authority from interfering too much with the little authority. (more…)

An exchange in The Corner over the weekend between Kevin Williamson and Matthew Franck encapsulates how the dynamic between economic and social conservatives often becomes dysfunctional. Here’s how it went down:

1. Williamson made fun of a post at the Atlantic that was breathlessly amazed Romney would have a gay man as an adviser, even on foreign policy.
2. Franck responded raising alarm that the adviser in question is an aggressive advocate of gay marriage.
3. Williamson argued that people who support gay marriage should be welcome in the foreign policy apparatus, and went on to make an extended series of arguments for why the marriage debate should be low priority for conservatives.
4. Franck’s rejoinder argued that the marriage debate is core to liberty and should be an extremely high priority.

These are serious posts by serious people and there’s a lot of substance in them to chew over, if you’re interested in the marriage debate vis-a-vis conservatism and how social and economic issues relate to one another. But there’s one other issue I really want to highlight.

Franck makes the point that the outcome of the marriage debate will hinge… (more…)

The Supreme Court declared in 2010 that public universities must permit religious student clubs to select leaders who share their faith. UNC-Greensboro is now getting around this by declaring that a Christian student club isn’t really religious.

On what grounds? It isn’t affiliated with a church.

Other schools are apparently pursuing this strategy as well. Expect to hear more about it.

This is closely related to the problem Nathaniel Peters wrote about on Friday. Peters was writing about the recent HHS decision to require almost every institution in America other than churches to become abortion providers. He made the case that if we base our objections to this on our own conscience rights, we may absolutize the privatization of moral principles, such that the public square is no longer responsible to any standard of right and wrong.

Alongside that problem, place this correlative problem: if we make claims based on the special role of religious institutions in society, we may invite unlimited oppression of all other institutions besides those that conform to the narrowest possible definition of “religious.”

This is not just relevant at UNC. In the debate over the HHS mandate, we’ve been maneuvered into defending a special right for “religious” institutions not to be forced to become abortion providers. All we’re doing is quibbling over the definition of “religious institution.” What about all the other institutions that aren’t “religious institutions” in the narrow sense, but are staffed by human beings (yes, even profit-making businesses are staffed by human beings) who are now required by federal law to become part of the abortion industry?

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the government wants to classify pregnancy as a disease. It’s the logical consequence of the way our culture externalizes responsibility for sex.

When I was a teenager, I was not yet a Christian but I was very pro-life. Among several formative influences, I recall with particular clarity one televised head-to-head on abortion in which a spokeswoman for a pro-abortion group, in place of offering any kind of argument, simply told her life story. “I was sixteen,” she began, “and I found myself pregnant.”

That’s odd, I thought. You just woke up pregnant one morning? Just like that? No cause? Wow. Maybe the Christians are right about virgin birth; they just don’t know that it’s still happening!

Having not yet come to faith, I did not yet know that it’s a duty to maintain a charitable disposition. I would not, today, strike such a snide attitude (or at least I pray that I wouldn’t). But I think that I wasn’t wrong to react negatively to the externalization of responsibility.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think this convenient locution “found herself pregnant” (FHP) is becoming more common. (more…)

The mandate to finance pharmaceutical abortion (and contraception) impacts the religious freedom of all Americans - not just Roman Catholics, not just Christians, not just religious believers, and not just those who work in institutions that are formally religious (and which are therefore impacted by the present “conscience clause” debate). We’re not pleading for special rights as members of some particular religious affiliation or institution. We’re claiming rights all human beings share, and that all Americans have a speical stake in as citizens of the nation most profoundly dedicated to religious freedom.

Even so, William F. Gavin’s comment on The Corner made me laugh out loud:

The obviously exasperated president didn’t even bother to come up with a good cover story. (One could almost hear him say, “Who will free me from these turbulent bishops?”)

My evangelical ears didn’t miss the subtle hat tip. Now that’s a form of ecumenism I can really get behind. Evangelicals and Catholics together!

Ho, hum – another day, another brilliant piece by Jordan Ballor on the relationship between a well functioning economy and a well functioning community. Yesterday Joseph Knippenberg noted this piece; today, Ballor strikes again:

Indeed, it was not very long into Dreher’s sojourn into small-town America that the limitations of the small, local, old, and particular became painfully obvious. As if on cue, less than a month into his new community, Dreher complained of the “frustratingly slow” Internet access in his house. You can perhaps imagine the gravity of the situation: “We had to cancel Netflix, because we can’t stream. My iPad apps can’t update, and have been permanently hung up for weeks (I’ve rebooted the iPad several times, to no avail). Skyping is very spotty. You can’t watch any online video, even YouTube, without transmission being interrupted.”

Dreher is savvy enough to realize how these complaints sound, and defends himself on the grounds that “given the line of work I’m in—media—I have to have reliable broadband access to do my job efficiently.” It seems when it comes to our professions, sometimes efficiency does trump simplicity after all. So much for Slow Journalism.

Dreher’s frustration in this situation illustrates in microcosm how deeply the contemporary communitarian conservative impulse relies on the technological innovations made possible by global trade…

But even as the irony of the Internet illustrates the deep dependence of communitarian conservatives on technological innovation, largely made possible by global markets, market conservatives are no less dependent on the insights of social conservatives…Market conservatism is not reducible to libertinism. But neither do Crunchy Cons corner the market on communitarian conservatism.

Mitt Romney continues to follow his campaign strategy based on emulating Mr. Collins by once again saying the very worst thing you can say. It’s like watching ten or twenty years of hard-won progress in teaching the people who understand economics how not to talk about poverty go right down the drain in front of your eyes.

This is not really about substance, this is about language. But language matters. A lot! People use stories to organize their lives. One of their stories is that good people care about the poor and bad people don’t. It’s a good story! (In fact, you can read about it in a good book.)

So you have to show people that you’re part of that story. Once you’ve shown them that, you can then move on and show them that there are a few chapters of the story that they haven’t read yet – the ones about what really works and what doesn’t in actually helping the poor. (more…)

…and if that post title doesn’t generate hits, I don’t know what will.

Yesterday, a friend who watches politics very closely proposed the following unified field theorem of the GOP nomination race: The GOP is Elizabeth Bennett. Mitt Romney is Darcy, wealthy and powerful – on paper, he’s not just highly marriagable, he’s everything the family needs in a match for one of their daughters. But he’s boring and off-putting. Could she really be happy with him? Gingrich is Willoughby Wickham [oops]; superficially he comes across (at least to some) as exciting, intelligent and someone who really understands her and what she wants. But he’s irresponsible and dishonest. Marriage to him would certainly be a disaster. His chief role is to remind Elizabeth how boring and off-putting Darcy is by comparison.

I offered a countertheory. Gingrich as the irresponsible Wickham, yes. But to my mind, Romney is Mr. Collins. Just like Darcy, Collins is a very attractive match on paper; just like Darcy, Collins comes across as boring and off-putting at first. The difference is that Darcy’s social ineptitude masked depths that Elizabeth would later delight to discover; with Mr. Collins, what you see is what you get. Remember the BBC version, where Elizabeth’s friend who married Collins describes how she’s very well taken care of, things are very pleasant, and oh by the way, she arranges every aspect of her home life to minimize the amount of time she sees her husband? Yeah, that’s what a GOP marriage to Romney would be like.

I think this has the makings of a great parlor game! Here’s my next contribution: Mitch Daniels is the early Darcy, the Darcy of the first half of the story. He’s overwhelmed with an ardent desire to propose to Elizabeth, but dutifully restrains his passions because of a prior restraint imposed by a domineering and possibly somewhat unbalanced family member. The difference is that Daniels hasn’t manned up and proposed (yet).

The possibilities are endless. Possibly Rick Perry as Bingley, who looked good on paper (Texas economy growing explosively) but turned out to be a tongue-tied amiable dunce? But Bingley is a pushover, and no one calls Perry that. I’m still working on it!

How do we fit Ron Paul and Rick Santorum into this equasion? Who represents, say, Mr. Bennett?

Is my political nerdiness showing? At least the humor value distracts me from the depressing reality, which Bret Stephens sums up devastatingly in his column today arguing that the GOP deserves to lose. I find it difficult to resist the conclusion that he’s right.

Matthew Schmitz errs when he suggests, in his critique of the Wall Street Journal editors, that the Journal‘s position is dishonest. The editors have not only made the morally right case, they have been honest and consistent in doing so. Schmitz doesn’t see this because he has misunderstood the case.

Schmitz admits, in the face of Robert Miller’s refutation, that R.R. Reno was wrong to suggest that the position taken by the editors can only be justified by moral relativism. (more…)

Over on TGC I offer some thoughts on what the European financial crisis has to do with theology:

All this culminated in cultures that made productivity—improving the lives of others by responding to their authentic needs—central to both individual and national identity. Scriptural treatment of this topic is extensive. Everything from the image of God to the Trinity to the prophets and parables is implicated in understanding productivity. Christians believe human beings are made in the image of a Father who creates from nothing; this explains why human work creates wealth rather than just moving it around. Christians believe in a divine Son who joined in mystical union with temporal and material humanity. Material activities like economic work are not separate from, and inferior to, “spiritual” activities. And Christians believe in a Spirit who liberates us from selfishness; this explains why life works best when people orient their daily lives around serving others.

Including some practical thoughts about what pastors can do about the crisis without overstepping the bounds of their proper role as pastors (not experts in politics and policy).

I first “met” Vaclav Havel in a political philosophy class. We were assigned The Memorandum. Do yourself - and your funny bone! – a favor and commemorate the great man’s passing by reading this hilarious sendup of the bureaucratic face of tyranny. It’s the most delightful satire you’ll ever read on what organizations run strictly on power are like.

Also, ROFTers may be especially interested in his lectures A Sense of the Transcendent and The Need for Trascendence in the Postmodern World.

His classic, The Power of the Powerless, is strictly for the hardcore reader; you have to skip over a lot of that dense Euro-verbiage that uses a lot of long, fancy words to say what could be better said in fewer and clearer words. But the book’s very history is really an amazing thing. He wrote a book about how he was going to bring down the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia, then he went out and did what he wrote. It’s like the good guys’ version of Hitler writing Mein Kampf and then going out and doing it.

Finally, since the new issue of FT features the inestimable Charles Glenn on why religious liberty requires the end of the government school monopoly, I won’t scruple to link to my own thoughts on what education reformers can learn from Havel – especially about school choice.

Although I prefer America’s stricter model of religious freedom to England’s, which might be characterized as the civil theology equivalent of the “strategic ambiguity” approach in foreign affairs, I was moved by Prime Minister David Cameron’s articulation of the English model in his speech on the occasion of the 400th anniverary of the King James Bible.

Cameron combines frankness about personal doubt and robustness in asserting the moral basis of civil justice. I don’t share his doubts, but I think those who have doubts should feel comfortable expressing them – and more to the point, it’s imperative that we not substitute inquiry into our leaders’ personal faith for inquiry into their commitment to the shared moral order that we look to them to uphold. Many leaders whose personal faith is unquestionable have failed, time and again, to show courage and perseverance in merely upholding bare justice. And many who clearly lack personal faith have been tireless and self-sacrificing moral leaders for justice and freedom.

Aside from his defense of the whole “Christian nation” thing, which means something different in England than it does here anyway, why can’t America produce leaders who talk like this?

(more…)

One of the aphorisms attributed to Martin Luther in German folklore states that after a man falls off his horse on the left side, the next time he falls off it will be on the right side.

In his gracious reply to what was, I admit, a provocatively worded critique of his post on engineering in modernity, Jace Yarbrough asks me for my thoughts on this question:

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I just came across this fascinating article by a Christian engineer, Jace Yarbrough, about “why we don’t have more engineers.” The shortage of good engineers has been the subject of intense effort for decades, yet the supply has stubbornly refused to increase. In addition to two factors that are already widely appreciated—engineering is intrinsically difficult so few can do it, and it is relatively impervious to artificial grade inflation; and engineering schools are often unnecessarily unwelcoming toward many students who could become engineers—Yarbrough offers a third. Few people want to be engineers, he suggests, because engineering means exploiting God’s creation for humanity’s selfish ends.

That many Christians have internalized this deeply unbiblical, implicitly Gnostic negative view of technological progress is not news. What is shocking about this article, however, is that this person has internalized it, and has done so in a particular way.

(more…)

Remember the Atlas Shrugged movie from this spring? More than 100,000 copies are sitting on store shelves right now with a title card that reads “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…”

Because we all know Ayn Rand is all about self-sacrifice!

The company behind the movie is offering free replacement title cards to anyone who requests them. The replacements will read: “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of rational self-interest comes to life…”

Don’t laugh too loudly! Let he who has never goofed up in print cast the first stone. I once let a report go out the door with a typographical error in which the letter “l” was missing from “public.” Not in just one place, mind you, but in the header at the top of every single page in the document. Beware the dangers of spell check!

(more…)

My response to Sam Gregg on “Locke, Metaphysics and the Challenge of America” is up. What I’d like to stress is that this is not ultimately an argument about John Locke. It’s an argument about the deep methodological questions involved in critiquing a society from a metaphysical standpoint:

The impulse to set up an exclusive clique of metaphysically approved thinkers and then devote our energies to “policing the border,” affirming only our favorites while consigning all others to the outer darkness, is not only unsound on the merits, it will also cut off our essentially Lockean society from the sources of cultural nourishment that it is most likely to be able to draw from…If all we do is emphasize that Locke has nothing morally or metaphysically significant to say, we will not only be stating a falsehood, we will be ensuring our own irrelevance…Indeed, we will be significantly helping our enemies…

Backfill here, here, here, here, and here.

Being myself a convert (in philosophical, not theological terms) away from voluntarism and nominalism to more metaphysically sound approaches, I am better positioned than most to appreciate the damage done to Locke’s thought by those influences. As Shakespeare wrote:

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