1. The Conference at Berry (funded by the U of Chicago project on the science of virtue) is drawing near (Nov. 4-5). You can hear about Descartes, Locke, Darwin, Percy, Tom Wolfe, George Grant, Heidegger, and much more. And of course you can meet Ralph Hancock, America’s leading theologian, and many others in person. Go to this wonderful website for further information, including the SCHEDULE.
2. On Progress or Return: That’s the choice Beck and Pestritto and many others give us between the Progressives and the Founders. But our Founders thought of themselves as on the cutting edge of scientific progress and against the discredited tradition of “monkish ignorance and superstition.” And the Progressives thought their opponents were too individualistic or not organic enough to cultivate a properly civic religion.
3. But Strauss, of course, gives us that choice between the ANCIENTS and the MODERNS, and he makes it clear enough that our Founders were more modern than ancient–just less modern than us.
4. John Courtney Murray gives us that choice between the residual Thomism of the Founders and wholly modern POLITICAL ATHEISM. (Murray and Strauss agree, in a way, that the Founding needs to be ennobled by a tradition or way of thinking older than anything American.)
5. Dr. Pat Deneen believes, much more emphatically, that our Founders themselves were too obsessed with the modern, progressive project of mastery of nature. And so he has to find an alternative American tradition–including the Puritans (including neo-Puritans such as the isolationist, anti-imperial, prohibitionist, and anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan), some of the Anti-Federalists, and dissident agrarians (down on [Wendell] Berry’s front porch on the [literary] farm).
6. Dr. PD is careful to have nothing to do with the southern agrarians, who were more conscious that the genuinely alternative American tradition might have to be aristocratic or Stoic. That’s why he was particularly repulsed by the Zeussian John McCain.
7. It’s surely the Stoic side of us that causes us to respect the Founders because they were Founders, as if America were Greece or Rome. The Founding aristocracy, so the myth goes in the REPUBLIC, decayed into today’s permissive or relativistic democracy. And then there’s various versions of the myth of decline from republican virtue to imperial decadence, which some of the Porchers like more than many of the Straussians.
More on this soon, especially on the Christians.
October 12th, 2010 | 11:57 pm
To paraphrase and rephrase Pink Floyd, How I wish that I were there.
October 14th, 2010 | 7:21 am
This is a delightful post. I like it when you do the ‘bullet point’ thing because it makes it easier to understand and allows you more latitude in your discussion.
Re: Wendell, I know he’s a Lincolnite Kentuckian, but I still find a whiff of magnolia in his stories, maybe a yearning for the “old” Southern stoicism sans the unpleasantness of African chattel slavery.
I am a bit ambivalent about the idea that we silly Americans yearn, at least subconsciously, for a responsible, truely ‘good’ and righteous elitist (see the election of 2008) fellow who will take care of us.
Hey, I haven’t given up on the Tea Party! I mean it looks like a lot of them are going to dislodge the current crop of parasites so maybe, just maybe, they’ll do God’s work. And, while it’s currently ‘smart’ to mock the Tea Party people they’re the only game in town that provides any possibility of succor…aren’t they?
Unlike Pat, I think these people will develope an agenda for ‘cutting’ gummint spending. The question is, how successful will they be in implementing that agenda?
I would appreciate the irony of these non-elitist residents of flyover country, straightening out the current Ivy League/Kenyan crisis.
October 19th, 2010 | 6:16 pm
Or climb to decadence, Nietzsche would say! But what I want to say is that pitting Progress vs. Return conceals the fact (I think it’s a fact) that we’re fundamentally mimetic creatures (as opposed, for instance, to rational or willing creatures). So Tocqueville is right (as is Nietzsche) that democracy as a form of social order can be fully or best understood without talking about the Founding. But Tocqueville doesn’t give us much of an opportunity to reflect on how we Americans will turn mimetically to the Founding again and again — to the American Revolution *and* the Constitution. Which might be a problem if this mimetic turning were hooked up to a serious longing for a civil religion. But we’re not Europeans, so that’s not gonna happen. We can’t all return culturally to the Founding, but I think we can return politically to the principles of constitutionally limited and sustainable government if we want to try.
October 23rd, 2010 | 5:09 pm
“I am a bit ambivalent about the idea that we silly Americans yearn, at least subconsciously, for a responsible, truely ‘good’ and righteous elitist (see the election of 2008) fellow who will take care of us.”
Perhaps we silly Americans simply are tired of depraved, unrighteous, or even just foolish elitists who have even less sense then ourselves?
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