A nasty shooting war over education is emerging between Education Secretary Arne Duncan and new presidential entrant Rick Perry. Although other issues are in the foreground, the broader backdrop is Duncan’s effort to set himself up as a one-man legislature versus Perry’s ferocious resistance to national control.

But the backdrop behind the backdrop is the deep estrangement between the two moral/metaphysical cultural coalitions that coexist (barely) in this country but don’t trust one another or strongly “own” one another as fellow citizens. This is why policy nationalization inevitably produces a vicious culture war, and that is exactly what has happened here.

If you read First Thoughts, you read it here first! (Unless you also read Public Discourse, in which case you may have read it there first.)

Samuel Gregg has a really great piece on The Public Discourse this morning, deconstructing my qualified defense of Locke here on First Thoughts. (See also)

This is serious stuff and I’ll be composing a full-dress reply to run over on PD. In the meantime, let me thank Gregg for investing the time and effort to compose this analysis. How we understand Locke is critical to our understanding of where we are now, how we got here, and where we want to go next. I agreed in my original post that Locke has deficiencies, and while I’m still going to end up disagreeing with Gregg on a lot of points, he’s pushed me to reexamine some things and I anticipate that I’ll be coming down somewhere slightly different from where I was before. The focal point is going to be opening up the question of exactly what we mean by “social contract theory” and to what extent the concept of contract was central for Locke – as well as to what extent the concept of contract means something very different now than it did in the late 17th century. Stay tuned!

In the Corner, Glenn Stanton comments on the juvenile snickering in some quarters about Dr. Marcus Bachmann, whose professional practice includes – as one thing among much else - helping people cope with unwanted same-sex desires. There’s no particular reason you would have heard of Dr. Bachmann, but you may have heard something somewhere about his wife. (I believe she has some sort of political job or something of that nature.)

After carrying out the standard-issue demolition of the offenders (and doing a rollicking good job of it) Stanton adds:

Over the past eight years, I have debated the issue of same-sex marriage and parenting on college campuses around the nation as part of my work at Focus on the Family. I cannot recount how many times people in the audience came to the microphone to question my own sexual orientation because in their mind, it is self-evident that anyone who makes such a careful study of why homosexuality might not be best for folks must obviously be wrestling with his own issues, right? One gentleman even threw in my obvious innate sense of fashion and style as another smoking gun. Seriously. But like Marcus, I also have a hot wife and five offspring we created and are raising together. Might they merely be a cover for something I am yet to realize? I wish the really smart people would let me know.

Glenn, how are we supposed to tell you whether you’re gay when you withhold from us information that is obviously critical to the diagnosis? Namely: is your hot wife running for president? If so, for which party?

Come on, Glenn. Your reluctance to disclose every aspect of your marital life to public scrutiny only confirms how uncomfortable you must be with your sexuality. Normal people love to be publicly hypersexualized. Becoming an iconic representation of some aspect of public sexual consciousness is the American dream. What else is there?

My first thought on reading the emerging discussion on David Brooks‘ column is: Obviously Brooks is thinking through the lens of a limited anthropology, but he’s an interlocutor worth engaging. Let’s pull apart some of what it says and see where it leads.

For example: the discussion concerns Dudley Clendinen, who is foregoing treatment for ALS because he would rather die than become “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.” The comment by Brooks that has drawn a lot of attention is:

Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.

In making this comment, Brooks skips over an interesting question: can a person who is “conscious” but unable to move “do activities with others”?

Suppose your loved one were in this state. Would you leave him to rot alone in the hospital? Or organize all his family and friends to come in and talk to him, read, maybe just hold his hand and be present?

At an even more basic level, there’s prayer. As you know if you’ve spent any time with people whose physical capacities are radically diminished, prayer is a vital, life-sustaining human activity.  And it is not something you do alone but something you “do with others” – three of them! No one is ever really “self-enclosed” unless he chooses to be.

So then: isn’t a society in which the default social expectation is to rally to people whose physical capacities are diminished going to be radically different from a society in which the default social expectation is that they should rid us of their troublesome selves? And is the way we deal with these issues in public policy contributing to a change in the default social expectation?

I actually think there is a real sense in which Brooks is right that when you can no longer “do things,” you are no longer alive. Life cannot be reduced to an ontological status. We just need to help people broaden their perspective on what counts as doing things.

[Addendum: This was poorly phrased. I can't do things while I'm asleep, but I'm still alive. I should have said that the ability to do things is a necessary part of an understanding of what human life is.]

How profoundly the Bible transforms our understanding of what it is to be human! And those who don’t receive the Bible can gain some measure of this wisdom at secondhand if we engage them in constructive conversation.

In today’s Journal, Peter Berkowitz comments on the recent Supreme Court decision on selling violent video games to children. He doesn’t say explicitly what side he’s on (if any) but he does come off as much more in sympathy with the dissenters; at any rate he stressees the need to protect the role of the family as the institution primarily responsible for the nurturing of good human beings and good citizens.

Not to beat a dead horse, but let me point out that Berkowitz correctly identifies Locke as the major philosophical source of the formative role of families as incubators of human and civic virtue in the American constitutional order:

John Locke, the 17-century British philosopher whose views on political liberty helped shape the U.S. Constitution, attached much less importance to art. And unlike Plato and Aristotle, he maintained that cultivating citizens’ minds and character went beyond government’s legitimate function.

But Lockean liberty, no less than Plato’s republic and Aristotle’s well-blended polity, depends on moral education. As Justice Thomas points out in his dissent, Locke wrote in his highly influential “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” that the family was the unit essentially responsible for children’s education. For Locke and for the American founders, the proper exercise of parental authority meant inculcating in young citizens the virtues that allow for the responsible exercise of liberty.

In fact, Berkowitz goes too far when he writes that for Locke “cultivating citizens’ minds and character went beyond government’s legitimate function.” That’s not true; there were plenty of things – intellectual and moral alike – Locke thought were so essential to the integrity of the civic community that he strongly supported using political action, including criminal law, to support them.

On the “minds” side, his Letter Concerning Toleration contains a laundry list of opinions that can legitimately be suppressed by law because they ipso facto make the person who holds them hostile to the civil community. Examples include support for tyranny, opposition to religious toleration, expressions of loyalty to a hostile foreign power, and atheism. Now, I think there is a strong case to be made that Locke’s main argument for religious toleration commits him to positions that are inconsistent with using criminal law against opinions even when those opinions are hostile to the civil community; but whether or not it was inconsistent of him to do so, he did think government could “cultivate citizens’ minds” in this way.

On the “character” side, Locke supported criminal sanctions on all sorts of issues that today we would classify as “moral issues.” This was, of course, integrated with his support for the family as the primary institution of character building. But the family needed strong support from the law where appropriate, and Locke was not hesitant to provide it. Not only was he in favor of criminalizing all the usual sexual crimes (adultery, etc.) but he also held that the natural law absolutely requires all governments, regardless of the particular circumstances of their societies, to forbid divorce in cases where minor children are still present in the home.

Why is this important? Because you cannot just make up a new political community from scratch. If we want to humanize the civil order again, we have to humanize the civil order we have, not some imaginary new one. And the American civil order is a Lockean order. To the extent that we can dig up its actual historical foundations, rather than trying to import new ones, the more we can do that, the better.

Obviously adjustments will need to be made. In spite of his foundational commitment to religious freedom, Locke is Protestant and his philosophical apparatus does make Protestant assumptions in some cases that will need fixing to accomodate real pluralism. Also, while Locke is not as metaphysically flat as many believe, he is not as metaphysically robust as we need; his command approach to ethics is insufficient by itself. (I would add that a virtue approach to ethics is equally insufficient by itself; both are needed.)

But while the American constitutional order must adjust its philosophical foundations to meet these realities, first there must be something present to be adjusted. If we don’t first understand what it is we are adjusting, we’ll never make progress. The real Locke has to be dug up and understood before the process of adjustment can truly proceed.

John Locke’s time is past, suggests Sam Gregg in The Public Discourse last week. Social contract theory has been the formative influence on American political thought, and our current debates can be broadly generalized as debates between the two poles of that tradition, with Locke on one end and Rawls on the other. Gregg points out the vacuity of Rawls; I would add that serious political theorists have long since recognized not only his vacuity, but his implicit political totalism (see, for example, Allan Bloom’s classic evisceration). And if this were just Rawls-bashing, I’d be having too much fun to contribute a response. But Gregg thinks we need to move beyond the social contract tradition entirely; Locke may be better than Rawls, but Gregg asserts that he doesn’t have what we need – a vision of human flourishing. Gregg would prefer to develop a new approach in which subsidiarity, not social contract, provides the formative theoretical construction.

Your humble servant begs to differ. The basic problem here is that Gregg, like most people, is talking about a cardboard cutout “Locke” that bears no relationship to the actual historical John Locke or his writings. There are, certainly, deficiencies in Locke. And I’m not sure whether “social contract” as such will continue to be the constitutive framework for political theory in the 21st century, given the state of degredation into which it has fallen. But I am quite sure that whatever framework does emerge will be one that drinks deeply from the Lockean well.

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Attention theologians and philosophers: a critique of Augustine’s theology of time helps the school choice movement develop better political strategy.

Special bonus: find out what America can learn from beauty queens about the best approach to teaching creation and evolution!

Krauthammer’s column today is about immigration, but it’s also about political civility. It makes me wonder if the best way to become truly civil isn’t precisely to stop being “civil” as that concept is now defined, not by becoming uncivil but by striving for a different model of civility.

As Krauthammer observes, those who talk loudest about the need for “civil” discussion of political differences tend to be the worst offenders against real civility. Unfortunately, the whole discussion about the need for civility seems to have been captured by people (in both parties) who want to use it uncivilly to delegitimize their opponents. “Stop demonizing people!” is a great way to demonize people. More broadly, the narrative “I am reasonable and civil” makes a great counterpart to the narrative “my opponents are irrational and illegitimate, motivated by a combination of religious and ideological fanaticisms as well as pure lust for money and power.”

I’ll admit that for my whole adult life, the cultured despisers of incivility have irritated me. The word civility has meant, to me, a tool for (uncivilly) demonizing those of us who have strongly held opinions that are out of alignment with the reigning orthodoxy.

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As Congress moves to consider renewal of the main federal education law this summer, the administration has been working behind the scenes to incorporate language that would give the U.S. Department of Education centralized control over K-12 curriculum across the country, including a national test that all students would take multiple times per year.

This morning, 118 educational and other leaders released a manifesto opposing these efforts. You can read it and add your signature at www.k12innovation.com.

Readers of First Things might be especially interested in an essay I’ve written, appearing in the online journal The Public Discourse this morning, about how nationalizing control of K-12 education would impact the dissolution of American culture:

Suppose you were nostalgic for the culture wars of the 1990s. Most of us have been relieved over the past decade, as the level of cultural savagery has begun to recede, and Americans with different religious and moral viewpoints haven’t been quite as eager to viciously tear each other apart as they used to be. But suppose you missed the height of the culture wars, and wanted to find a way to bring it all back. You could hardly do better than to turn over control of K-12 education to the national government. If the 1990s were a culture war, the 2010s will be a culture Ragnarok.

Last week, reading Donald Luskin’s Journal op-ed on Ayn Rand, I was deeply shocked and saddened by this sentence:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) insists that all his staffers read “Atlas Shrugged.”

Guess what? Turns out it’s not true!

This morning, Ben Domenech – having seen the same assertion in another source – reports:

Always skeptical about the offhand, unsourced anecdote from Beam’s piece (which wasn’t even focused on Ryan), I reached out to several former Ryan staffers yesterday to ask them whether the Budget Chairman had required them to read Rand. While everyone knows Ryan is indeed a personal fan of Rand’s work, not a single one of them said Ryan had required them to read the books. Responses include: “I had already read it prior to working for him, but it is by no means a requirement for employment,” and “Saying he ‘requires’ his staff to read it is definitely stretching the truth,” and the flat out denial: “We are not required to read Rand.”

Domenech documents numerous places in the left-leaning media and blogosphere where various forms of this story – sometimes it’s The Fountainhead rather than Atlas Shrugged - have been uncritically circulated as evidence of Republican extremism. From his post, it looks like Domenech (a fan of Rand) is unaware of Luskin’s having also uncritically repeated it as evidence of Republican good sense.

Domenech also recalls how the paranoid left used to delight itself with simliar horror stories about the alleged deep Randianism of the Reagan administration, reproducing an amusing passage from a 1987 Maureen Dowd column. (Isn’t it reassuring to know that in a world of crisis and catastrophe where all the basic structures of our civilization seem vulnerable to instant destruction at any moment, there are some things you really can always count on?)

I’m deeply grateful to Domenech for doing the basic reportorial work of fact-checking that neither the paranoiac left nor Luskin were apparently able to rouse themselves to do.

In today’s Journal, Donald Luskin defends Atlas Shrugged as “a plea for the most fundamental American ideal—the inalienable rights of the individual.”

Where does one start? What are “rights” in a universe where there is no morality other than what can be derived from the value one places on one’s own life, and no metaphysics other than materialism plus some more or less trivial residuum to allow for sense perception and volition? If rights are not correlative to duties that transcend our will – and on Rand’s view it is a matter of first principles that there are no duties transcending the will – then what are they? And how can they possibly be “inalienable” if one is morally subject to no will above one’s own?

The original idea behind the phrase “inalienable rights” was that rights are inalienable because they are correlative to duties and responsibilities that exist objectively and transcend the will, and that we are therefore not allowed to shirk. You are not allowed to consent to dictatorial government even if you want to, because that’s inconsistent with your fulfillment of the transcendent duties that you are under, and that are partially constitutive of who you are as a person. This was a point of central importance – for some purposes it was the point of central importance – in the political philosophies behind the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, from which the phrase “inalienable rights” historically sprang. The argument on the other side (at least among social contract theorists) was that you consent to the king’s absolute authority when you participate in civil society. The word “inalienable” was inserted to deny this, and the only possible justification for it is the existence of transcendent duties.

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Responding to Matthew Anderson’s new CT article, Joe Knippenberg kicked off an interesting conversation on evangelicals and natural law. If you want to see a fair test case of evangelicals and Catholics working to figure out how to talk to each other about this, check out the comment thread.

Natural law is just a subtopic of the larger problem of mapping out the borders and the interaction between the church and the world. What this always comes down to is the need to balance the two different ways in which the Bible characterizes God’s revelation of himself to the human race at large. These are neatly summarized in Romans 1 (to which Mohler appeals) and Romans 2 (the touchstone text for defending natural law).

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Over at The Public Discourse, Micah Watson demolishes David Gushee’s attempt to draft John Locke into service in favor of gay marriage. Watson does an admirable job of establishing that Locke saw no contradiction between 1) religious freedom and government based on natural law, and 2) public regulation of familly, marriage, and sex in the interest of procreation and the nurturing of children, even going far beyond anything desired by most public opponents of gay marriage today.

Some points I’d like to add:

1) Watson doesn’t directly challenge Gushee’s characterization of Locke’s politics as something other than “Christian.” This is something I run into all the time – if it’s Lockean it’s not Christian, and if it’s Christian it’s not Lockean. In fact, Locke’s politics rely extensively on Christianity in numerous respects, especially in anthropology. Locke drew primarily on Christian intellectual sources (though I will admit there is a serious incursion by the non-Christian nominalists, who got their hooks into Locke through their critique of Descartes) and in turn had extensive influence on subsequent Christian thought. Jonathan Edwards, for example, drank very deeply at the Lockean well.

2) For the record, Locke may or may not have held unorthodox views about the Trinity – the evidence is incomplete – but he was at the very least Christian in the ways that matter most for the formulation of political philosophy. As I once heard someone say, “Locke thought he was a Christian.”

3) Watson doesn’t pursue Locke’s views on marriage more broadly, but they are stronger than most people are led to believe. For example, Locke thinks the natural law absolutely forbids divorce if there are minor children in the family. If that were enacted into law today, how radical of a change would it be from the status quo?

4) Watson’s piece is titled “John Locke and the Evangelical Retreat from Marriage.” What evangelical retreat from marriage?

Yesterday, Joe took a crack at the hot topic of the day, Rob Bell’s new book. Among other things, he quotes Al Mohler, praising Mohler’s willingness to “defend orthodox evangelical doctrines against the gooey New Age-ish mush that is creeping into our tradition.”

Then he ends with this:

Mohler points out that liberal Protestantism and Catholicism have come up with their own ways of resolving the scandal of this doctrine. That’s fine. I have no beef with those traditions. My concern is with those who claim to be evangelicals while advocating or teaching a doctrine that is inconsistent with evangelical theology.

As Mohler notes, “there is no way to deny the Bible’s teaching on hell and remain genuinely evangelical.” He’s right. You don’t have to be an evangelical to believe in hell, but if you stop believing in hell then you’re probably no longer an evangelical.

That doesn’t quite work. It sounds like Joe’s problem isn’t that Bell is selling the public “gooey New Age-ish mush,” but that he does so while claiming that his wares are “evangelical.” I mean, if Bell announces tomorrow that he’s going to stop calling himself an evangelical, would his teaching suddenly no longer be gooey New Age-ish mush? What Joe is really doing here isn’t vindicating truth but policing the boundaries. Sell all the mush you want, but please, let’s have truth in labeling.

Moreover, if you accept Mohler’s characterization of liberal Protestantism and Catholicism, how can you not “have a beef” with them for accepting an attitude that, when it appears within evangelicalism, you call “gooey New Age-ish mush”? Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations!

Of course, one need not accept Mohler’s characterization.

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This morning Joe noticed Jordan’s excellent response to the new manifesto from some evangelicals who desperately want to be (or be seen to be) relevant to the debate about government spending and debt.

Among the document’s many failings, there’s one in particular I want to call more attention to. Jordan notes that the manifesto purports not to “endorse any detailed agenda.” Here is the relevant section:

We do not endorse any detailed agenda. Experts disagree. But it is clear that a bipartisan agreement must include the following basic elements:

• We must cut federal spending. That will include corporate and agricultural subsidies, the defense budget and salary increases of federal employees. But it does not mean cutting effective programs that empower poor Americans or contribute internationally to economic development or the advancement of health. Neither does it mean neglecting appropriate investments in things like education and infrastructure.
• We must control healthcare expenses. This is a most difficult problem and it cannot be ignored. We must find a way simultaneously to respect individual choice, ensure quality health care for everyone, and stop spending an ever-higher percent of our GDP on medical costs. Everyone must be willing to sacrifice. 
• We must make Social Security sustainable. We can slowly increase the retirement age, modestly reduce benefits for more wealthy seniors, and increase the amount of income taxed to pay for Social Security.
• We must reform the tax code. We should remove many special exemptions, end many special subsidies, and keep the tax code progressive.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a little . . . heavy handed? “It is clear that bipartisan reform must include…”

These statements may seem innocuous, but many of them conceal uncritically assimilated moral, economic and political judgments. These may be right or wrong, but they ought to be made explicit and examined. And even if we were to grant that these agenda items are the absolutely right approach, or a reasonably achievable consensus approach, or even both, isn’t it a bad idea to make it morally mandatory to support any complex policy agenda?

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