A tremor was felt rumbling through the land…

…fitful dreams interrupted, of mobs and protests, shrill cries, a yellow flag is waved in great swoops, festooned with the sign of the black pistol, there are other flags, secret meetings, solemn pledges, stockpiled cans and legal briefs, debates about deadbolt technology, “this is a fragment of the true gavel,” the police shouting at those other police, clutched documents, shoves, he is pushed back and forth trampling upon the pages, the fine glassware is smeared, icily quiet signing ceremonies with awkward protocol confusions, resignations, silences, “it’s like she’s cut us off,” rumors, threats, “the semester is cancelled,” “the payments are suspended,” strikes, evictions, shaking of heads, “but they won’t speak to him anymore,” crosses, ugly crosses, and crosses crossed out, sweet nostalgic reminiscence about the days of facebook, radio, and singing together…

We awake, the shaking stops, and yet, as in that scene with Jack Lemmon and the coffee cup from The China Syndrome, somewhere there is a man who feels the very slightest and yet oh-so-telling of an after-tremor.  Something is not right.

Yes, “A spectre haunts America.” At least it does this American. Not, I think, the spectre of tyranny… …no, that’s the one for Europe… …for us, the nightmare’s name is:  civil dissolution.

But no, c’mon, it’s 99% forgotten in 9 seconds, it’s all normal, normal, and always must will be, coffee-schedule-and-career, my everyday fellow Americans, good-morning my dear, they can only take it so far, don’t you know, so pass the baseball page please, and then a glance at that IRS scandal story…

The truth of the matter is that, generally speaking, things are typically getting better and worse. We conservatives have a standard based in human nature or the whole human person—the free and relational being–by which we can evaluate political, moral, and technological change. Our social or historical “narrative” is neither progressive nor reactionary. True human progress occurs over particular lives in the direction of wisdom and virtue. And that progress can occur just about anywhere. Solzhenitsyn experienced it in the Gulag. Tom Wolfe in A Man in Full shows how it can occur after reading the Stoic Epictetus in a maximum security prison. And we know that the real experiences of Admiral James Stockdale and John McCain as POWs weren’t so different.

If we say it’s hard to be a saint in the city, that’s because it’s hard to be a saint anywhere. It’s true we live in radically untraditional times. But that’s both good and bad for authentically Christian life. As Walker Percy wrote, today Christians really have to think about who they are, and that’s because we live in a time where’s there’s little to no real guidance when it comes to “lifestyle choices.” It’s surely in some ways better to have to think than to live in a time a more traditional time when most people didn’t give the truth (or the “commitment”) of Christianity a second thought.

It’s easy for us to see that Christianity is, in some ways, quite the untraditional religion, depending as it does on wonderfully spectacular unprecedented events—such as creation, the Resurrection, the unique irreplaceability of each of our created personal lives, and the grace and the salvation given to particular persons.

We conservatives also see clearly, of course, that the truth about God is necessarily and beneficially embodied in the traditional, relational institution we call the church, and we see the idiocy (in the precise sense) and so the unsustainability of the “individualistic” Protestant view that it’s possible to know the personal, relational God all alone through one’s own conscience. But we also marvel at what’s genuinely, if quite incompletely, Christian in the Spirit-driven enthusiasm of America’s Pentecostals and many of our Evangelicals. The practice of the genuinely relational virtue of charity flourishes among many of our believers.

It is easy to see contradictions in the combination of bourgeois individualism, strong senses of place and fammily, and genuinely and often quite “otherworldy” Christian belief we can see in the South today. But even in the best cases, most good people in a free country are going to be living contradictions. It’s utopian in the bad or nonselective sense to romantically believe that people once–in the polis or the medieval village–led noncontradictory or perfectly integrated lives. Even good people, after all, were sinners then and sinners now.

Lives oriented by orthodox religion—by genuinely countercultural religion—may actually be becoming more common. Consider that the number of Jews in New York City is actually on the rise, thanks to the huge orthodox families. The observant Catholic Church in America has become smaller, but also more genuinely observant. Our prosperous, high-tech, online society makes homeschooling increasingly more easy. It also has facilitated working from home, and even, as Rod Dreher has shown us, moving home to work from home, without returning to the drudgery of living off the land. It’s possible, we’ve seen, to combine “organic” and high-tech features in genuinely “postmodern” forms of appropriately relational lives oriented around family, church, and meaningful work. Being a good father, for example, is getting harder for some but also easier for others. Family life is both dissolving and regenerating in somewhat unpredictable ways.

There’s still plenty of opportunity to live virtuous—even heroically virtuous–lives as free and prosperous men and women in a society such as ours. Everyone is challenged by the relational responsibilities of love and the invincible necessity of one’s own death. It’s tougher in some ways to live well—to find humanly worthy happiness—in our time, when so much human effort is directed toward thinking through the “how” (technology) and so little directed toward thinking about the “who” and the “why” (who we are and what we’re supposed to do). It’s tougher to live well when human institutions in which our relational places and so personal happiness are most readily found—such as the family—are more unstable than ever. But it’s easier than ever in others—due largely to the techno-successes of modern science and the effective justice of the modern science of government–and far from impossible overall.

1. So I’ve gotten a couple of complaints (really) that my contribution to BBS below was insufficiently sensitive to diversity issues. Well, that’s true.

2. The HR officer who called Sheldon in was a black woman skilled, as Leonard would say, in handlIng human relations issues. She’s likely the only smart black woman Sheldon has had contact with. The show, realistically enough (statistically speaking), does not feature any physicists who are black women. Sheldon stereotypes blacks as recent victims of slavery, and so he gives her ROOTS as as a gift. He has to learn why that’s inappropriate, why he should see each particular woman more personally and not as a member of a species or race.

3. That exposure to DIVERSITY does teach Sheldon something about being human, as does his exposure to real women in general. But it doesn’t make him a better physicist. And so we might say that affirmative action in physics or the STEM fields in general makes no sense. The true or legal diversity argument is all about its educational contribution–and not about equity or justice.

4. Sheldon, of course, learns more from the seemingly ordinary–but spirited or gutsy and good looking–white woman Penny. It probably shouldn’t be within the educational vision of elite universities to teach nerds how to relate to pretty girls who give it “the old community college try.” You might object to this line of analysis that Sheldon ain’t a student, but a researcher. But after all his life didn’t really change after getting that second PhD.

5. In general, arguments for DIVERSITY are about making students beter persons. They’re sometimes couched in vocational language, but that’s not what’s really meant. It’s what left of “the transformational ideal” of liberal education. But also part of that old idea is Sheldon’s view that the humanities so understood are relativistic drivel.

6. Minds should be transformed by awakening the longing for what’s really true, independently of “cultural perspective.” Right now we’re stuck with the alternative “worldviews” of the UNITY of physics theory and the DIVERSITY of the humanities.

7. It goes without saying that POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY–and 21st century THOMISM–aim at the science that overcomes that alleged clash of worldviews. The aim, as Walker Percy says, is to put back together what’s true about the existentialism at the foundation of making cultural diversity the bottom line with what’s true about Anglo-American empiricism (as found in analytic philosphy and the “consilence” aspiration of natural science).

So here’s a round-up of reactions to the new Obama administrative mandate–the if I’m offended (however unreasonably) you’re in trouble college speech code.

Ken Masugi reminded me of the trouble Sheldon Cooper has had with his university’s human resources officer. But in Sheldon’s case that woman was schoolmarmish in the good sense. She patiently instructed Sheldon that he can’t simply speak his mind to women; he has to respect social conventions. She civilized him a bit. All the guys had HR issues. But when the time came to evaluate them for tenure, the HR officer considered only their actual scientific accomplishments. This is one piece of evidence among many that the show is too gentle and good natured to reflect actual academic life.

Or maybe there’s just a lot to be said for the scientists’ benign indifference to “speech issues,” at least usually. There’s no denying that Sheldon’s science is distorted a little by status and self-esteem issues, but he wouldn’t think of going to HR to get protected from the hurtful (and hilarious) venom of Leslie Winkle. An argument over the truth of string theory isn’t much like an argument over race, class, or gender–not to mention sex. It doesn’t occur to Sheldon or Leslie that words are merely rhetorical weapons to make a physics theory politically or academically dominant.

BIG THOUGHTS HERE (Sorry about the earlier link.)

Marxists, libertarians, and other progressives often mistake conservatives for reactionaries. Conservatives, the progressive allegation is, want to return us to a time when we were less free and less responsible. And that’s because we have a romantic or even utopian view of the past. The allegedly anti-reactionary truth is that it’s impossible to go back, to reject our technological accomplishments and to embrace discredited illusions about, say, the place of women.

We conservatives reject the progressive view that it’s impossible to go back, given that we now live in a more advanced stage of History. History isn’t simply a tale of either progress or of decline and fall, and who each of us is isn’t completely determined by his or her Historical situation. It’s just not true that the sophisticated understanding of who women are these days is simply an advance over the alleged prejudices of the past.

Our understanding of who we all are has become too “Historical” or even “existential” or not properly natural or personal. Our sophisticates mistakenly think each of us can define the mystery of his or her personal existence—personal identity—without regard to the purposes and limits he or she been given through his or her embodiment, through birth, genuinely relational life, and death.

But it’s also true that we can see, in justice, that our high-tech society has opened possibilities for largely unprecedented personal development for women. We add that it’s difficult—much more difficult than progressives and liberals acknowledge—to reconcile personal fulfillment through work with the more relational forms of free personal fulfillment as a parent. It’s hard to properly honor “voluntary caregiving” in a society that’s, more than ever, a meritocracy based on productivity. But that’s the challenge that’s been given us, and we conservatives pride ourselves in facing up to it. We think that both love and work—even contemplation and charity—should animate every personal life.

We conservatives also reject the reactionary view that it’s somehow necessary to go back—to, for example, an earlier stage in “the division of labor”—in order to live well. We don’t think we’ve simply advanced beyond some legacy of repression, as progressives say. Nor do we think we simply live “after virtue,” as some reactionaries day. We think it highly unlikely that we’ll get back home either by returning to the farm or by entering some self-constructed “Brave New World.”

So we realistic conservatives reject the romanticism of both the agrarians and the transhumanists, of those who’ve diverted themselves from facing up completely to the challenges we now face. Sure, we conservatives are nostalgic for the ways personal lives—manners and morals—were more properly relational in the past. But our nostalgia is self-consciously selective. We admire, for example, the classy Stoic realism of the best aristocrats of our South without wanting to bring back the slavery and racism that distorted their rational self-confidence, just as we can admire the egalitarian idealism of our Puritan founders while rejecting their bizarre and tyrannical (and, truthfully, not properly Christian) effort to criminalize every sin. In this sense, we conservatives can be called postmodern.

As Solzhenitsyn explained, we think it’s quite possible to work for a world that avoids the spiritual excesses of the medieval world and the material excesses of the modern world, to work for a world worthy of the person as a whole. Our selective nostalgia is part of an effort to incorporate what’s best and most truthful about human experience so far in our lives today. So our “appropriation” of tradition is far from uncritical, but we couldn’t really be critical of the excesses or pathologies characteristic of our time (and all times have them) without knowledge of the human alternatives embodied in the knowledge we receive through tradition.