First Things has been updated for the iPad. It has the same elegant style as the print magazine, but we’ve changed the formatting in significant ways to make the articles more readable for electronic subscribers, and easier to navigate. You can buy individual issues or sign up for regular monthly delivery. Check it out in Apple’s iTunes store, or on our website (which I hope you’ve made your homepage).

We can thank Austin Stone for the iPad update. He steps into a new role at First Things, that of e-publisher responsible for “pushing out” our content on “multiple platforms.” (That’s a sentence I never imagined myself writing.) First Things remains committed to old-fashioned print. That’s my preferred way to read serious articles and essays. But we also want to give our electronic readers formats as easy and pleasurable to read as the crisp, clean pages of America’s finest journal of religion and public life.

While welcoming Austin Stone to the team, I’d also like to acknowledge the departure of Joe Carter, our former web editor. He is now senior editor of the Acton Institute and an editor at the Gospel Coalition. Joe is an important voice among religious conservatives, and a man whose faith, integrity, and intelligence I admire a great deal. In his five years with the magazine, Joe was an adept tech guy, an insightful writer for our website, a faithful Christian, and a good friend. Thanks, Joe.

Samuel Gregg offers a thoughtful assessment of my debate with Robert Miller about economic freedom: its effects and prospects.

Gregg is certainly right to point out that we need a moral argument for capitalism, not just a utilitarian one. The fact that it produces wealth is a good thing. But economic freedom also opens up space for human creativity, agency, and productive cooperation. Quite right, and important.

I would go a step further and simply say that productive work brings with it as sense of dignity. Workers can sense a make-work situation, and they take less satisfaction in that kind of work. A poorly organized workplace, one that impedes productive cooperation, also demoralizes. One of the good consequences of creative destruction is that it puts a great deal of pressure on unproductive enterprises. We want our labor to “make a difference,” and capitalism, however frivolous some of its aspects, increases the changes that what I do from 9 to 5 adds up to something.

However, I do want to take issue with Gregg’s claim that a negative view of capitalism is the “prevailing wisdom.”

That was true when I was a college student, but I don’t think it’s true any longer. I’m struck by how easily the Zuckerberg generation fuses idealism (change the world!) with capitalism.

I would say that today’s “prevailing wisdom” is that capitalism is—inevitable. Most people take it for granted. That’s why our economic arguments take place in such a narrow range. I don’t think anyone in 1970 could have imagined that right would be defined as a 35% top marginal tax rate and left as 39%!

Meanwhile, the left has adopted all sorts of free market principles. The Obama administration recently announced an initiative to expand experimental programs in public housing that limit long-term dependency. Since the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, most liberals have come to see precisely what Gregg thinks important: It’s morally good for people to work and play a productive role in a free economy. They’re more fulfilled when they can contribute and take responsibility for themselves.

This scrambling of old ideological distinctions is part of the challenge we face. What’s conservatism going to look like for the Zuckerberg generation? I’m not sure.

I’m sure that’s true, about Pamela I mean. But she’s more than someone making really cool stuff. She’s a window on our twenty-first century culture and our seamless garment of money-making and idealism.

Pamela’s someone who, like the rest of us, sees herself as unique. She’s got a bleached swath of hair and doesn’t “believe in” alarm clocks. “I’m not your typical engineer,” she says. Apple products all the way, of course. Asked about her favorite time saving device (remember, this is lifehacker.com), she replies, “the IUD.” Think of all the time saved not worrying about birth control pills!

But the ways in which Pamela is unique are pretty conventional. Americans have been individuals in the same way for a long time. It’s her job that’s telling. She’s a product engineer at Coursera, a for-profit company that “partners” with dozens of big-name universities to provide free on-line courses, so-called MOOCs, massive open online courses. With them you can take Stanford University’s Larry Diamond’s course on democratic development, or a Cal Tech professor’s course on galaxies and cosmology.

This is new frontier stuff in education. Thus the Coursera website: “We believe in connecting people to a great education so that anyone around the world can learn without limits.” Without limits! “We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few.” Everyone! Pamela’s very excited too: “I joined Coursera because I love their mission, and also because there is so much more experimentation to be done in the world of online education.”

I don’t doubt that Pamela, the founders of Coursera, and the venture capitalists who have put many millions into the company believe in their product—believe in their roles in the Great Educational Revolution. But I also don’t doubt that they would very much like to get rich (or in the case of the venture capitalists, to get richer still). I have no brief against moneymaking, but this is Amway on steroids. And it’s typical today. We want to believe: Anyone around the world can learn without limits. And we want to win, win, win in the great race for wealth. Thus Pamela. Every few months she re-reads Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. (I am not making this up.)

I don’t think Pamela realizes how strange and new this seems to me. The ad men on Mad Men would blush at the hype masquerading as idealism. I can’t understand a mind that can so easily fuse feel-good, sentimental moralism—breaking down barriers to elite education!—with a job as a technical cog in what some very rich people in Silicon Valley hope will be a profitable business with a big payout.

Two thoughts:

First, I strongly believe Pamela represents our age: IUDs, for-profit companies proposing to save the world (without limits!), insistent assertions of individuality, and Dale Carnegie. It’s not a wicked age (though Kermit Gosnell suggests otherwise). In many respects is sensible, functional, and appealing. Pamela would probably make a good neighbor. But I can’t see how it makes much sense.

Second, I’ve been writing recently about the triumph of capitalism, chiding conservatives for misguided worries about socialism. Pamela, Coursera.org, and lifehacker.com provide powerful evidence that whatever our secular liberal culture wants, it doesn’t want anything other than capitalism. Perhaps it can’t even envision anything else, so easily does its moralism and chipper idealism serve moneymaking purposes. 

Here’s a short poem. It’s part of a series titled “Warhol’s Portraits.” This one takes up Warhol’s portrait of Mick Jagger:

Mick Jagger

He is in my opinion past his prime
already in this print, and he and Keith
are fast becoming tacky little shanks
and sherry-slurping, chicken-headed whores.
They shake their butts and sweat in leather pants,
like ancient drag queens high on Angel dust.

Ouch.

There’s a longer poem about Ana Mendieta and the New York art scene that’s particularly pungent.

Lord Byron’s Foot. It’s a fine book of poetry, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Great observations about American popular culture. Highly recommended.

For example, it’s fascinating that young people now accept economic discipline with little protest. That’s something I wouldn’t have predicted when I was in college when people still worried about being imprisoned in what Weber called the “iron cage.” But at the same time our age rejects sexual discipline as inhumane.

Another example: Most Ivy League students are likely to admit that many Americans aren’t able to participate in the lucrative global economy. They just don’t have what it takes, as it were. But mention gay marriage and they suddenly become proponents of a strict equality, viewing with great dismay my belief that two men “just don’t have what it takes” to get married.

In both cases our era believes very sincerely and deeply in the supposedly inviolable laws of economics, while rejecting as absurd the natural law. We’re docile to the marketplace and in rebellion against our bodies.

It’s unsurprising, I suppose. As Pascal recognized, it’s our fate to work at cross purposes and live against ourselves.

The piece speaks of sports as a bulwark of “heteronormative socialization,” with the implicit suggestion that this, like homophobia, has to go. What would a society look like that doesn’t involve “heteronormative socialization”? My view: It’s a society in which the vast majority of people are disoriented in life, while the elites navigate rather well in a culture of bespoke identity formation.

Capitalism works best when all our desires are free, because then they can be reconfigured and redirected toward the needs of the market. That’s pretty much what the Nation wants, it seems.

When I was a young person I could imagine the success of the LGBT agenda. Sexual freedom was in full swing when I came of age in the late 1970s. What I couldn’t have imagined is the present complicity of the left with the dissolving, atomizing effects of global capitalism. Whether it’s legalizing marijuana, permitting pornography, or ending “heteronormative socialization,” the left today is all about getting morality out of the way. The marketplace, therapy, and bureaucratic management fill the void.

He writes, correctly I think, that “gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage.”

What do Americans believe? Dreher says it’s a post-Christian individualism that reigns. For traditional Christianity (and for all traditional religions) moral rights and wrongs reflect cosmic truths. We thus accept moral discipline, because in so doing we participate in the dignity and truth of reality itself. (This is the spiritual pay-off of natural law arguments, which are meant to help us live in accord with our true natures. They’re not about policing behavior.)

The secular moral imagination thinks otherwise. At the end of the day there are no cosmic truths, and so we default to the immediacy of desire, unless practical or utilitarian concerns limit us. For such a view life is most “noble” when most “free,” which means unimpeded by moral constraints that are increasingly seen as meaningless.

Dreher is surely right that religious faith is at odds with this view of freedom. For freedom Christ has made us free. St. Paul meant by that a freedom from bondage to sin that allows us to enter into a more perfect obedience to God’s law. He’s also surely right that the success of gay marriage suggests that increasing numbers of Americans find this religious view of human freedom unintelligible, and thus aren’t likely to be all that enthusiastic about Christianity.  In that sense, support for gay marriage is a tell-tale. As it rises, the churches fall.

Societies are complicated, and our moral imaginations aren’t always consistent. As Dreher knows, there’s no simple formula at work here. But he’s right about what gay marriage means for our society, our moral imaginations, and our attitudes toward religious authority.

During his oral argument before the Supreme Court, Ted Olson observed that marriage is a “fundamental right.” This is a confused statement.

It’s true that marriage is very important, fundamental, in fact. It’s part of the DNA of society, and for most people the path in life most likely to bring stability and happiness. And so government should not have an unlimited capacity to muck around with marriage. It’s too important for politics, too fundamental for us to turn it into a policy that might or might not be implemented.

In other words, people have a “right” to live in a society in which marriage is a widely accessible, stable, functional institution.

But that’s not really what Olson and other proponents of “marriage equality” mean. They’re saying it’s more individualistic: each individual has a “right” to whatever definition of marriage suits him, which isn’t the same as our right to marriage as a stable, functional institution, and may in fact be at odds with it. That’s because to secure Olson’s sense of “fundamental right,” government must in fact muck around with marriage to make it plastic enough to guarantee that everyone can have the kind of marriage that suits him. In so doing, marriage changes. It’s no longer a pre-political institution the state protects and advances so as to secure our fundamental right to the possibility of marriage as a stable, functional institution. Instead marriage becomes a creature of politics, which means vulnerable to definition and re-definition (and therefore instability) as political circumstances vary.

It’s the possibility of this instability that motivated Justice Sotomayor to question Olson: Doesn’t this notion of marriage as a “fundamental right” make it pretty much impossible for the state to regulate marriage. Doesn’t a mother have a “fundamental right” to marry one of her children? She didn’t mention polygamy, but she could have.

Olson denied that his notion of marriage as a “fundamental right” led to such conclusions. The state rightly prevents exploitation, abuse, patriarchy, and so forth. Perhaps, but it’s important to see that these are political limits, by which I mean subject to the ebb and flow of political concern about such matters, which is sure to be fluid. Right now we think polygamy involves the exploitation of women. Tomorrow? And what about a bisexual woman who wished to form an intimate, socially affirmed bond between both a man and a woman?

I don’t think we’re on the brink of affirming such a possibility, or others. Right now our political culture wants to affirm “straight” homosexuality and slot it into traditional views of marriage: monogamy, permanence, domestic partnership, childrearing. In that sense Olson is right. But we need to see the transformation for what it is. In the past our political culture took the institution of marriage as a given, and legislated for its sake, thus making more secure the good of marriage for society—making more secure our “fundamental right” to marriage as a stable institution. Now Olson sees the desires of individuals as a given and we have a right to the sort of marriage that suits those desires. (Why he limits the fundamental rights to “straight” gays and lesbians rather than less bourgeois ones is hard for me to understand other than politically, by which I mean as part of the elite consensus that wants to think this way.) Therefore marriage needs to be redefined.

Put differently: They’re desires that are stable, by his way of thinking (e.g., gays and lesbians are a “class” that for purposes of law must be taken as a given). On the other side marriage (and indeed all cultural norms concerning sexual behavior and identity) must be seen as fluid and changeable.

There’s a metaphysical purism here, one characteristic of theoretical liberalism. Only qualities adhering to individuals have standing before the law. Traditional institutions have none. In this case, marriage as such has no standing before the law.

What marriage is has no relevance for deciding whether or not a person’s “fundamental right” to marriage (as understood by Olson) has been violated. Olson can only adduce harms to other individuals (exploitation, abuse, patriarchy, etc.) as reasons to restrict our “fundamental right” to marriage. These harms are for judges and the political process to decide. Nothing about marriage as a traditional institution is relevant to these future decisions or processes. (Exploitation is exploitation, marriage or not, etc.) Marriage, therefore, becomes a political construct for the purpose of fulfilling the individual’s “fundamental right,” and that right can only be limited by determinations of what counts as sufficient harm to others. Marriage as a stable, functional institution is therefore at the whim of the political process that is forever deciding what counts as a harm sufficient to limit a right.

I beg your indulgence for what I fear is an overly abstract analysis. I’m trying to get to my conclusion: In an important sense, Olson’s fight for the “fundamental right” to marry whomever we choose without regard to what marriage is comes at the expense of our fundamental right to marriage as a stable, functional institution.

Let me give an analogy: Education is a fundamental right in much that same way that marriage is. We have a right to live in a society in which educational institutions are widely accessible, stable, and functional. There’s an individual dimension, to be sure. I should have access to educational institutions properly fitted to my aptitudes and goals. But it’s about more than the individual dimension. My fundamental right to educations is empty if I’m guaranteed access to dysfunctional schools that fail to provide a decent education. And so my “right to education” can readily serve as a reason for government to buttress, strengthen, and reform educational institutions, not in accord with me and my aptitudes and goals, but in objective terms, in terms of what education is. New York City schools often fail educationally, which is to say that they fail to achieve the ends of education (reading, writing, and arithmetic), not that they fail to be accessible to all students irrespective of status.

What Olson is doing is akin to redefining the fundamental right to education in a way that makes no reference to what education is. That would be disastrous, because it would force us to redefine education solely in terms of its accessibility. New York City College did just that in the late 1960s with an open admission policy. The result: instability, dysfunctionality. A just society has many features. Some have to do with individual rights. But features of a just society have to do with healthy institutions. A just society cannot guarantee educational opportunity solely by way of guaranteeing equal or free or open access—the aspects that have to to with individuals.

A just society must respect that nature of education and nurture the institutions that serve its ends.

The same hold for religion and religious institutions, community and communal organizations. The same holds for marriage.

It’s possible, I think, to affirm same-sex marriage in terms of what marriage is: domestic partnership, the context for disciplining our sexual desires to serve the higher end of a permanent bond, monogamy as an intrinsic good. That’s a truncated version of the traditional view, but it’s a view. But that’s not the way current campaign for “marriage equality,” and perhaps not surprisingly. Olson’s metaphysical purism—sexual desire as the ground of Being, as it were—is widespread, and may in fact be a fundamental, non-negotiable principle of the sexual revolution.

A friend sent me a recent piece in the New York Times about super-athlete Kilian Jornet Burgada. He leaps tall buildings in a single bound, etc.

Super-extreme sport, the athletic hero, the perfected body . . . are we seeing signs that our post-Christian culture is reverting to classical ideals? That’s the question my friend asked.

Plausible, at least for the upper middle class. We live in a time that worships the perfectly sculpted body, and the masters of the universe see an ascent of Mount Everest as a way to crown their professional success as lawyers, doctors, and investment bankers. In these and other ways, our secular culture adopts old (often modified) ideals. It’s evidence that the trajectory of our time is not toward nihilism but to new cultural norms or revitalized pagan ones that may end up being reasonably functional. Functional, that is, for elites. In ancient Greece the winners weren’t anxious about their dominance.

That worries me. Our new meritocracy tends to see itself as natural rulers, which is of course the same way the ancient Greeks on top saw themselves.

Juan Domingo Perón is the defining personality in modern Argentine history. He was a protean figure, hard to categorize. Some regard him as a proto-fascist, others as a proto-socialist. But all agree that he smashed the old oligarchies that dominated Argentina, setting in motion the many convulsions of populist and anti-populist movements that have roiled Argentine society. To this day a wide range of politicians claim the title “Peronist.” It’s akin to saying you’re in solidarity with “the people,” which has a very real but ill-defined meaning.

There are leftist Peronists and rightist Peronists. In the current scene in Argentina, Pope Francis is on the right. He was notably and sometimes sharply opposed to the Kirchneristas, the government of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner that has ruled for the last decade. Fernández notes the joke that God seems to be playing, having elevated a conservative Peronist to the papacy from a country ruled by a progressive one.

Fernández thinks that by and large the political establishment in Argentina will find ways to claim Pope Francis as their patron. Cristina Kirchner is off to Rome to commune with the new pope, and this in spite of refusing to meet with him on many occasions in recent years. But there are true believers on the left, “setentistas” formed by resistance to the dictatorship in the 1970s. They will continue to “abominate Francis.”

But it’s not going to be easy. “It will be difficult by any means to respond to a simple comparison. Who is more progressive? Someone who lives in Puerto Madero or Palermo Hollywood, who owns several properties, travels in planes and helicopters with armies of guards and wears gold Rolexes and designer clothes? Or a priest who lives in a completely austere environment, wears worn down shoes and a weathered coat, travels by bus and subway, eats in soup kitchens, and regularly visits the slums?”

For those not familiar with Argentina, it’s Cristina Kirchner who wears the gold watches and designer clothes. She enjoys the support of the “setentistas,” because she’s the progressive. Supposedly.