Harvey Manfield provides an astute analysis of the Progressive claim to transcend partisanship which ultimately turns out to a dream about the decisive end of politics itself. Peter has made a compelling case on our blog that we’re stuck with virtue and the corollary to this view is that we’re stuck with politics (and parties) as well. Also, it often turns out that the pretense of ideologically neutral bipartisanship is little more than a thinly disguised version of ideologically laden political committments that are peremptorily insulated from public debate. I discuss Obama’s bi-partisanship and the stubborness of party here.

My dissident appreciation of Socrates and a wonderful book on his virtues can be found here.

Lots has been said in memory of McInerny, who, of course, died last Friday. He wrote well over 100 books of all kinds. He was a theologian, philosopher, novelist, poet, and then and now a saint. He showed that a talented and industrious man can both be endlessly profound and make a huge amount of money through writing, and he usually thought it best not to do too much to mix up the two goals in the same book. He thoughtly clearly enough and believed deeply enough not to be “neo” anything or be associated with any fashionable school of thought, and what he wrote always had the confident ring of truth. He might have been the greatest of the great teachers of the pre-elitist era of Notre Dame.

Ralph’s last philosophical/theological book, Praeambula Fidei (CUA Press), is surely THE authoritative defense of the intellectual legitimacy of Thomistic metaphysical and moral realism–an indispensable postmodern conservative theme–of our time. It goes without saying that Ralph would have thought identifying the slogan “postmodern conservatism” with the renewal of Thomistic realism with a kind of American twist is a silly display of failed wittiness. Thank God he was more than willing to both forgive and laugh at the lack of the Irish, and he knew most of us were no more than peeping Thomists.

So Marc Guerra (America’s leading theologian) and I are finalists for a big SCIENCE OF VIRTUE grant at the University of Chicago. Although I doubt we’ll win, we deserve to win. That’s because we alone are defending the one true “stuck with virtue” science of virtue. It’s the “stuck with virtue” approach that distinguishes postmodern conservatism from porcherism, neoconservatism, neoorthodoxy, anti-progressivist founderism, tea-party techno-libertarianism, evangelical worldviewism, paleoconservative traditionalism, and so forth. Here are our proposed opening comments (which can be changed, so please comment):

We don’t think we live “after virtue,” as Alasdair MacIntyre claims. We haven’t lost our ability to experience or to articulate our perception that the best way to feel good is to be good. People are still stuck with and ennobled by living morally demanding lives. Life is in some ways easier but in others harder than ever before. We live neither in some techo-utopia nor in some techno-wasteland. Virtue is alive in the tacky McMansions we find in sprawling exurbs. Even the sophisticated Europeans who talk sometimes as if they are living some postfamilial, postreligious, and postpolitical dream still can talk about what they know about the line between good and evil found in every human being’s heart.

In a time of unprecedented abundance and freedom that’s largely the product of the modern, technological approach to the world, we do find it harder than ever to know who we are. And so we find it harder than ever to know what to do. But we’re still stuck with answering those questions to live well—or nobly and happily—with what we’ve been given. There’s little that’s more hellish than my being stuck with the perception of “pure possibility,” the perception that every door is open to me with no guidance at all concerning which one to choose. That’s the lesson, for example, of the novels of our physician-philosopher WALKER PERCY, not to mention the philosophic film GROUNDHOG DAY. The pure democracy imagined by Socrates or communism as imagined by Marx or the realm of techno-freedom imagined by our libertarians (all of which amount to the same thing) are all descriptions of the hell we have mistaken for heaven when we misunderstand who we are.

The hopeful perception of pure possibility, of course, is the characteristic delusion of our exceedingly high-tech time. We really aren’t Nietzsche’s last men or living at Marx’s end of history. We don’t live unobsessively picking activities almost at random from a huge menu of choice. We still have display “bourgeois virtue”—the industrious, productive virtues—to flourish. We’re still moved, whatever Allan Bloom says, by love and death. And we’re anxious and disoriented because we’re more unclear than ever about how to live with the knowledge and longings that we can’t help but have. Both morally and economically, we in some ways experience ourselves as more on our own than ever. We too often, in the name of autonomy, reject as authoritative the guidance nature—our social natures– gives us, and we’re dogmatically skeptical about the possibility that our longings point us in the direction of God. But much of what we think we can reject or discard remains real or real enough.

So it’s obvious to us that the biotechnological promise to free us from the constraints of virtue for the happiness that accompanies pure freedom will never be kept. We’ll never achieve immortality—or some absolute transcendence of the limitations of embodiment. The best we might achieve is a kind of indefinite longevity, which would make death seem more accidental and so our beings more contingent and our moods more anxious than ever. And even if our moods become chemical silly putty in our hands, we still wouldn’t have what it takes to choose the moods that make us most happy with being who we really are.

We, in our pride, don’t want the zoned-out contentment we imagine cows have. We want to remain alienated enough to appreciate Johnny Cash, without going through the hell of being Johnny Cash. We want to be artistic and sensitive as we can be while being, unlike John, cheerful and productive members of our high-tech society. And anyway, if our moods got too good, we would stop obsessing enough to fend off the real threats to our very being—like terrorists, asteroids, and such. The search for the perfect mood inevitably leads us to realize that the good stuff (like love and pride) depends on the hard or bad stuff (like worthwhile work and death), and once we achieved that sort of wisdom, it seems to us, we wouldn’t want our moods chemically altered after all.

We have an inalienable right to our moods, in part, because they aren’t random collections of chemicals but natural clues to the truth about who each of us is. We also have a right to our moods because what we’ve been given by nature, if used well or virtuously, is good enough. Nature, Darwin was right to say, intends all the species to be happy by living according to nature. But Solzhenitsyn added, of course, that we weren’t born only to be happy, because we were also born to die.

So we’re stuck with virtue as human beings. There are natural reasons for that. We’re hardwired for virtue, so to speak, because we’re hardwired for a kind of language and or speech that opens us to the truth about ourselves and our world that no other animal can acquire. And we really can’t change our hardwiring in a way that will make us both human and happy—and we want both—without virtue.
So we need, above all, a science of virtue that incorporates what we know through natural science, philosophy, theology, and the humanities generally. We need to get over the modern error that the best way to get ourselves happy is to free ourselves from our natures. And we need to get over the error that by nature we’re pretty much one species or one mechanism among many.

More me thinking about the state of education in America through the historical and theoretical sources of our present discontent:

The central object of Lockean education, the rational control of nature, begins with the defective natural constitution that originally plagues all children, “their natural wrong inclinations.” So while Locke seems to follow the Aristotelian view that education requires the inculcation of proper habits of action, he denies that this is a perfection of their natural potential; we certainly are guided by “Principles of Action” but they “are so far from being innate Moral Principles, that if they were left to their full swing, they would carry men over to the overturning of all Morality”.  The advantage of any child’s natural disposition is that it pines for liberty, but too easily that craving is overtaken by a concomitant desire for “dominion,” the “first original of most vicious habits.” The natural disorder of children expresses itself in the tyrannical will to power over others, and the conventional response of parents is to subdue this desire with the discipline of the traditional virtues.

However, Locke counsels avoiding feckless appeals to duty, sacrifice, or God, instead suggesting that the only sure route is an appeal to desire—more specifically, an appeal to reward and punishment or pleasure and pain, the only objects that naturally arouse fear. In place of the classical teaching that emphasized the disciplined flourishing of our natural potential, the Lockean approach attempts to contravene nature, to overcome our natural infirmity through natural aversion. The “most powerful incentives,” the only ones that count as the “true restraint belonging to virtue,” are “esteem and disgrace.” The natural desire to dominate others can be sublimated into a desire for honor or prestige, transforming the anti-sociability of natural tyranny into the sociable desire for reputation. Moreover, children can be taught to want to be esteemed for their reasonableness above all things, although at a young age they actually have very limited rational powers. Thus, the Lockean educational program honors children for their reasonableness long before they really are reasonable: children “love to be treated as rational creatures sooner than is imagined” and sooner than is warranted. The ultimate fruition of a pupil’s schooling generates a paradox: he learns the gregarious desire to be honored for his rational self-sufficiency.

Even more iconoclastic than Locke’s view of the family is his virtual elimination of religious instruction. Locke was deeply worried about the impact a “promiscuous reading of the Scripture” would have on impressionable minds, favoring its replacement by a catalogue of “moral rules” and a “good history of the Bible.” The problem of traditional Biblical study, according to Locke, is threefold: First, it replaces a rigorous rational scrutiny of all things with a credulous acceptance of miraculous and supernatural events. Second, it engenders a passive submission to paternalistic authority as our natural condition, rather than the natural freedom and equality of all rational beings. Finally, it preaches that a bountiful nature is the providential bequest of a personal and loving God, as opposed to the provider of “almost worthless materials” that only obtain value from the human labor that transforms them into something useful. The comprehensive human liberation Locke aims for requires the decisive repudiation of the Biblical description of the human condition. The authority of God, once taught, is much harder to unseat than the authority of a human father, whose imperfections diminish the respect he can demand, and whose flattery fans the flames of independence. The eternity of God creates a specter of authority recalcitrant to revision. We outgrow the necessary and gentle tyranny of our fathers to become fathers ourselves, but God is a constant reminder of our insuperable limitations.

Locke’s precipitous dismissal of religion anticipates its gradual expulsion from the modern university as little more than ancient and benighted prejudice. Furthermore, Locke’s obsession with rational productivity is a clear precursor to the careerist turn the university would eventually take, becoming something more like a credentialing center than a place of higher learning; Locke disdained belletristic study long before it was fashionable to do so. The ultimate goal of education, for Locke, is the generation of businessmen and scientists. He says very little directly about civic or political virtues, since the real advancements in a free society are made by private citizens rather than public representatives. In fact, he says almost nothing about philosophic education. The passive and noble contemplation of eternity is exchanged for the active and productive transformation of the here-and-now world.

Still, Locke is keenly aware that rational autonomy is not an unproblematic goal, and his enthusiasm for it is somewhat tempered by a recognition of the obstacles in its way. . Locke begins with the family in part because it proves to be such an inveterate article of nature, the original stage for our impressionable experience of dependence, limitation, and legitimate authority. He sees education as the stark introduction to our natural given for the sake of its eventual conquest—he essentially wants children to be taught to pine for their father’s station.  The university today is far too homogenous and institutionalized for Locke to approve of it, and far more Platonic in that it sees its role as replacing the education of the parent and even remedying its ill effects. The American university aims at a kind of rational autonomy and sees an education in reason as identical to an education in morality; however, it no longer draws upon the reflections of those Enlightenment thinkers on the great tension between moral authority and rational self-sufficiency. Locke promoted the facile harmony between rational independence and moral dependence with so much success that modern higher education does not fathom that there ever was a tension in the first place, that reason and morality aren’t simply identical, that rational freedom does not exhaust the whole of virtue. We are far more Lockean than even Locke was and far more confident that, with the university’s expert assistance, we can happily complete the process of educative self-construction.

So I got an email criticizing my post below for not talking up ELI as representing the truth that is Christian theology. Good point, actually. Here’s my feeble memory of what the movie’s unfashionable but genuinely illuminating teachings are along those lines:

1. Each of us has free will and a personal destiny. No situation genuinely deprives us of all choice.
2. Prayer is first of all about gratitude about what we’ve been given. Maybe the main failing of the modern, high-tech world is that people had much more than enough but less gratitude than ever and so wasted much that was good. People forgot how and why to pray.
3. It’s almost easier to pray when you’ve been given just enough and so you can see more clearly what’s genuinely indispensable or precious. (Eli here reminds us of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag.)
4. What we’ve been given that’s most precious is God, family, and friends. Life without any of those is the closest experience we have to hell. Without those, we become worse than the other animals–cannibals, for example.
5. We should do more for others than for ourselves. Eli read that in the Bible but was so mission-driven that he forgot to live it. But then he willingly surrendered the pleasure of reading the Bible to save a friend, a beautiful woman to whom he was not physically attracted. And his friend (Solara, the source of light) learned that, of course, not from the Bible, but from her love of her loving and sacrificial mother.
6. We will all be judged for what we do.
7. God is personal, cares about persons, and is incessantly active in the world. Creation wasn’t some one-time thing at some point in the past as, say, Locke or the Big Bangers teach.

So I agree with Bob, finally, that the movie was, in the most important ways, neither stupid nor ridiculous.

1. It’s very much worth seeing, although it’s far from the best movie ever made. The best Christian movie ever made remains TENDER MERCIES. But Bob may be right and I may be wrong. It could be that the movie’s teaching style doesn’t correspond to my learning style.

2. JWC was right to have observed that the brilliant and (comparatively speaking) erudite tyrant played or overplayed by Oldman wanted the Bible for its rhetorical power. Its words are weapons, he says, to control the weak and desperate. And those words will mercifully alleviate his ruthless cruelty. If he can do some persuasive talking he can do less killing while indefinitely expanding his power over people. But I’m confused, I have to say, because when was the last time a tyrant actually used the words of the Bible in that way? They sure weren’t the words of the 20th century tyrants. And the words of the Koran are a somewhat different kind of weapon. There’s also some sense that the tyrant was deceiving himself about why he wanted those words. The longing in his eyes when he thought he was finally about to read them seems to be more about freeing himself from the tryannical impulses dominating his soul. That, of course, was a genuinely Christian moment. At that point, not to give too much away, he learns he should have been nicer to his wife.

3. Of course Denzel does his usual great job, and his character is a nice variant on how amazing grace transforms the blind. Tht he received a revelation that gave his life purpose, an indispensable purpose, is presented as both real and moving. He knows he will complete his mission and can’t be stopped by any or all forces. That does kind of muck up the battle scenes, where he does all manner of precision killing that can’t be explained naturally. We know in advance–because he says so–that he’s getting out of that house alive, despite the fact that the tyrant’s little army has enough firepower to level it many times over. And only the hand of God explains why it doesn’t occur to someone to just shoot him in the head.

4. The Bible ends up in the hands of a little band of intellectuals closeted on Alcatraz working to preseserve all the books and music essential to human civilization. I like the emphasis that the future of civilization depends on books or that renewal will occur a lot, lot quicker with them. But it was deflating to see the Bible placed on the shelf as one essential book among many, right there next to the Koran and so forth. It’s not clear whether or not the Bible is THE book for us all, although there are several special reasons why it’s the only book for Eli/Denzel.

5. The Bible, we learn, came a lot closer to disappearing entirely than the other essential books, because there was a concerted effort after the catastrophe to destroy every copy. Nobody was out to get, say, Shakespeare. It seems that the big war was blamed on the Bible, but it just isn’t explained why.

6. Why did God empower a man to preserve the King James version of the Bible in particular? Attention is called to that fact more than once.

7. The details of the war are a little too politically correct for me. It seems to have been a nuclear exchange that knocked a huge hole in the ozone layer. It was direct exposure to the sun that did most of the destruction of life. Virtually all vegetation disappeared. And anyone who didn’t get underground and stay there for a year died. Lots of people were blinded. Still, the people around 30 years later seem pretty healthy all things considered, even though most or all of them apparently have never eaten their vegetables. Cats, dogs, birds, and mice managed to survive. And although water is extremely scarce, there seems to be plenty of gas for the motorized vehicles that are miraculously still running. In general, the movie, although arresting and profound in some ways, isn’t really distinguished by exacting attention to detail. It’s above my pay grade to figure it all out, but a lot more care was given to symbolism–Biblical and otherwise–and nods to many other films.

ONE MORE ELI POINT: The movie is actually quite Christian on what it means to see. It’s quite possible for the blind to see in the most important way without the sense of sight. And biological eyes aren’t that precious; smell and touch can compensate. (The movie, meanwhile, attentively shows us that people with eyes don’t really know how to smell [or touch].) Before the catastrophe, Eli says, people had too much and didn’t know what was precious. The Christian point explored is what it really means to be wounded.