I was shocked and amazed to read Charlotte Allen’s long cover story for the February 15 edition of the Weekly Standard, entitled “The New Dating Game.” It is an exploration of the sexual mores of contemporary American society, either as they actually exist or as they are being imagined and described in a range of sex commentary blogs, which the author surveys with great interest and precision. Either way, Ms. Allen’s article is a fine piece of social science, and seldom is social science so arresting. At any rate, it sure beats Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf for late-night reading.

If Ms. Allen is anywhere near correct in her account, I gather that we are no longer living in Jane Austen’s world. True, beneath the surface, there are some alpha males lurking in Ms. Austen’s society, and one can detect in some of her females incipient cougar leanings. But all these things are partly channeled and  controlled by the weight of convention and by the consequences of sexuality in a different technological era.  Well we have broken through, for better or for worse. A pincer movement of advanced technology (birth control devices, new antibiotics) and a new morality of a male-style feminism have breached the walls of convention, which are tumbling rapidly, even since the recent and more halcyon days of the hook-up culture. Ms. Allen describes the return of a Paleolithic age that has none of the grace found in the Flintstones and none of the agonizing sensitivity of the cavemen of the Geico ads (these last, as Rousseau said of the men Hobbes described in his state of nature, only place modern man into a fictive primitive setting). It’s quite a world out there now, best accounted for in Allen’s speculation by Darwinian evolutionary models. George Gilder had seen this all before, a long time ago, even before he had all the biological studies that the modern analyst can cite.  And it seems to be ending just where he thought it would.

There is much room for commentary from our esteemed stable of writers, whom I invite to weigh in, along with the deeper thoughts still of Pomocon readers. Besides, it will boost our circulation hits beyond those of the Porch.

“Incline thy ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call!” Psalm 102

Forms—let’s call them for the moment manners, little rules of protocol, the observance of ceremonies—are the heart and soul of civilized life. And that is why the conservative, pre- or post-modern, is so solicitous of them, for he/she knows that civility is what keeps the wheels of social intercourse rolling. It is a fine thing, therefore, to have these little rules. I know, for example, that when I see a colleague, whatever I may think of him/her (or whatever she/he may think of me), I am supposed to offer a greeting.  It is a convention that often helps me get past the moment.

The opposite of forms is captured by the wonderful democratic phrase “let it all hang out,” which I think—meaning the internet told me—originated as a lyric with a rock group called the hombres. Letting it all hang out, excluding any of its more graphic connotations, means, according to various dictionaries, “saying or doing exactly what you want” (generally a poor idea), or “being yourself” (a worse idea still). I recall a wedding I attended many years ago, in which the ceremony, dictated by centuries of careful thought and adjustment—a “form”—was going very nicely; but then, alas, the presiding member of the clergy took it upon himself to step outside of the rules and add something of his own. Following a ten-minute soliloquy on why the congregation should support the president (it was Bill Clinton at the time) and urge our congresspersons to support his wife’s healthcare plan, we returned to the couple at hand, standing before their Maker, ready to pledge their vows till death do us part. Somehow the little ethical interlude did not quite measure up to the solemnity of the occasion.

But what happens when there are no forms to guide us, when some new situation or circumstance occurs that is unregulated by any previous rules? Technological innovation is often the source of such situations, which is reason enough for some staunch conservatives to be opposed in principle to technology itself. Take some of my friends sitting on their front porches in their little communities. There is a whole protocol of communication that is built up around this little idyllic setting. If you place yourself and your family on the front porch, unprotected by any kind of hedge, you announce that you are fair game. Someone strolls by on a hot summer evening—that is what people are supposed to be doing—and if they call to you, you are obliged to respond. You have signed away your privacy. And if they persist in chatting you up, all tiny signals of resistance notwithstanding, you have no alternative but to oblige. Form demands it.

Which brings me to the problem of email. Just what are the forms, especially—for my specific concerns—between teacher and student? I have no choice but to list my email address at my university, at pain of not knowing of upcoming lectures (thus sacrificing my intellectual well-being), or of department meetings (thus relinquishing my civic rights), or of social events (thus forgoing all social intercourse). But my address being “out there” in cyberspace, does it follow that I am supposed to respond to an inquiry from any student? Have I been placed, willy-nilly and without my consent, on the proverbial front porch, so that when the message arrives, invariably beginning “Hello Professor,” I will break conventions and commit an act of rudeness by a quick deletion? Certainly, this is how students see things, no doubt especially students at small liberal arts colleges. An email message is not like a telephone call without an answering machine. It has arrived and there is no denying it. It is like a letter, but how often would a student in the past have sent a letter, which imposed the costs of paper, thought, envelope, a stamp, and a trip to the mailbox? For the students today, the matter is all but settled: incline your ear and answer me speedily in the day that I write. I am still resisting, applying this principle only in regard to my occasional communications to them.

I agonized over this dilemma with a couple of post-doctoral fellows the other day. They listened bemusedly, as if the whole issue were passé. Their response? Just wait till you are on Facebook! To paraphrase a lyric of Metallica, May that day never come.

So I finaly saw CRAZY HEART. It’s supposed to remind you of TENDER MERCIES. There’s another old-guy, almost has-been brilliant country singer/songwriter turned around by a beautiful single mom with a father-starved little boy. Robert Duvall shows up in CRAZY HEART as the only real friend of the Bridges character, and he sings just enough to remind us that he really can.

The frist thing to be said is that Jeff Bridges and Robert Duvall are arguably the most effortlessly manly American actors, although they also both exceedingly subtle masters of their craft. The second is that the musical performances by Bridges are utterly convincing as grizzled Texas greatness, as are the ones by Colin Ferrell as today’s country slickness. All the songs are good, and a couple you like more and more as you hear them sung repeatedly. Go to the movie just for the music.

The Bridges character, even at his most drunken, is a real gentleman, a dignified man in full (or as full as possible given his circumstances). He treats his fans and his old songs with the class they deserve, and he knows (except when really, really drunk) how to treat women. He even can figure out how to puke with dignity in the middle of a performance. He’s also lonely beyond lonely, a fact that both is the cause of and caused by his being drunk for decades.

The Duvall character in TENDER MERCIES is redeemed by the woman and her boy, reconciles with his daughter (for a while at least), gets baptized, and his whole personal life is restored in tact. It’s quite a story about grace.

The Bridges character is dumped by the girl once she realizes that he’s dangerous for her boy and can’t get anything going with his son whom he hasn’t seen for 24 years. He is returned to physical, mental, artistic, and financial health after turning himself over not to God but to rehab experts. The single mom, quite reasonably, still doesn’t take him back, but he manages to stay on the wagon. The movie ends with his being reconciled with his uncompensated loneliness and even with the woman he loves getting what she needs and deserves (a good, presumably younger, reliable guy). It’s quite a stoic tale.

Overall (and although CRAZY HEART is not as good as TENDER MERCIES), these two films display the twin peaks or fundamental alternatives to dominant American Lockeanism found in our South and its music–evangelical Christianity and stoic philosophy (on the latter, see William Alexander Percy, LANTERNS ON THE LEVEE).

The last thing to be said is that this is a very EROTIC movie. All of Bridges’ longings (and hers) are animated in his relationship with the Maggie Gyllenhaal character (an aspiring writer with a love of a man of beautiful words and deeds but a mom above all). This is the most credible and tragic film couple in a long time. Love doesn’t conquer all, as both the old stoic poet and the realistic young mom know. Maggie G deserves the big awards as much as Bridges for getting so much across in so few words.

The last two paragraphs of Dr. Hughes’s remarks provides the best opportunity to engage him in conversation. Here, he provides a comparison between the transhumanist definition of reason and a pre-Enlightenment explication by examining two houses floating in mid-air. The pre-Enlightenment house (reason) is a “ramshackle huts of mud daub and random flotsam, tied up with string..,” surely not a very functional facility, while the Enlightenment house (reason) is a “..pure, lean precision of Reason we have built our houses of Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberal democracy and other clean architectural marvels…”

Here, clearly, we have a man in revolt (psychopathology) against the tension described by the Classical Greeks, Platonists, and Christian thinkers as a connection between Reason and existence in openness to the ground, raised to consciousness. Reason, then, is differentiated as a form existing in reality predicated on a “faith and trust (pistis)” in a cosmos ordered by the divine, in love (phila, eros) and exemplified by Augustine’s “amor Dei.” Further we can say that “Reason” is an openness toward the totality of reality (Bergson’s “l’ame ouverte”) where as for Dr. Hughes “Reason” exists not as a mode within the “tension of existence” rather as a structure existing in a self-contained immanence. Dr. Hughes has taken a position in apostrophe, a turning away from the ground, and in so doing is turning away from “self,” The ramifications of such an act are clearly described by the Greeks and Romans in terms of experiencing “anxiety” and ignorance (agnoia echon) where the condition limits true insight (phronesis) and acts to release or fails to contain “desires” and “passions” (here we might argue that the derailment describes intellectual “passions”) and reaches denouement in a condition of fear, and frenetic behavior predicated on a loss of direction; the loss of self.

The good news is that Dr. Hughes’s essay is illustrative of a person in the condition of “questioning unrest,” where he writes, “Acknowledging that we are all in mid-air and don’t know how we got aloft in the first place is damned scary….” I realize Hughes’s comments aren’t exactly representative of a philosopher acknowledging that he is in a condition of searching, questing, seeking but here we might give the man the benefit of the doubt. Consequently, the question is will Dr. Hughes follow “the attraction to the ground and unfold into noetic consciousness,” or will he ignore the ground and continue in his attraction to the psychopathological derailment that is Enlightenment “Reason?”

Thanks no doubt to all your prayers and crossed fingers, we got the grant from the Science of Virtues people at the University of Chicago. Turns out they weren’t offended by that misleading first sentence or my high-risk call not to use power point. It could be they were seduced by the schmoozing charm of America’s leading theologian.

Our first conference, to be held next fall, will be on what the Thomas Jefferson of today would regard as our trinity of scientists–Descartes, Locke, and Darwin. The Americans, as Tocqueville says, manage to be Cartesians without ever having read a word of Descartes. Locke was probably the best Cartesian ever, and he certainly is the key to America. And one interpretation of our history is our growing inability to keep Locke in a Locke box. Culturally, of course, our country is divided into whole- hog Darwin affirmers and faith-based Darwin deniers. But it goes without saying that it’s unlikely that the scientist Darwin is either completely wrong or completely right. He certainly not as right as the popularizing scientists called the new atheists say. Darwinianism is certainly social, but not at all in the way the Social Darwinists suggest. Properly understood, Darwinism is one antidote to the extremism of our hyper-Lockean or libertarian autonomy freaks. That’s not to agree with Darwinian Larry Arnhart that any true conservative could be simply or mainly a Darwinian.

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.