So I’ve always liked Jonathan Rauch and regarded him as sometimes singularly in touch with the facts. Here’s one example: For the most obvious reason, he’s all for same-sex marriage, but he knows it’s better for everyone if the courts stay out of the struggle.
Here’s another–the best summary around of the bad and getting-worse situation for working-class men (men who do predominately physical–as opposed to mental–labor).
A Marxist would say that what we have here is a problem of capitalism. Everything that follows is an exaggeration, but it still is all about issues that Republicans are going to have to become more attuned to:
1. Mental labor is getting worth more, physical labor less.
2. Those who excel at mental labor are disconnecting themselves progressively more thoroughly from those who don’t.
4. The wages of the working class are moving toward mere subsistence. And so (this is not so Marxist) the incentive to work is diminishing. Our “capitalists” allow “the proletariat” not to work through keeping them alive with minimalist entitlements–which, of course, cleverly fend off revolution by keeping them from hating too much the existing division of labor. Still, it’s obvious that the benefits of our relative prosperity are trickling down less well all the time.
5. So the conditions that sustain ordinary families are imploding. Say what you will about UNIONS, they were about protecting a “family wage.” But, for reasons a Marxist could easily explain, UNIONS are toast, victims of globalization, the imperatives of the division of labor, and our (predictable) lack of “economic patriotism.” The disappearance of UNIONS is pretty darn ambiguous as a new birth of freedom. It’s true that the result might be more jobs, but at lower wages.
6. Men are especially hard hit. Their work has been dishonored. Broken families make fatherhood increasingly superfluous. Men still have “traditional values,” but they are finding it harder to live according to who they think they are. Meanwhile, those who excel at mental labor are flourishing in relatively traditional families. Their lives are better than their “bourgeois bohemian” values.
7. The various solutions Rauch puts forward all seem pretty lame. Eliminating entitlements would hardly address the big problem. Neither would some scheme that would give everyone (an increasingly worthless) college degree. Both LOVE and WORK, the keys to living well, need to be more honored and more sustainable. And the most repulsive trend might be the condescending NONJUDGMENTALISM of those who excel at mental labor toward ordinary people and their struggles. I’m not a Marxist because I’m not an economic determinist, and I don’t think the world “capitalism” is all that empirical. Nonetheless, there are things to think about here.
December 17th, 2012 | 10:28 am
Powerful stuff grounded, I think, on this remark:
“Say what you will about UNIONS, they were about protecting a “family wage.”
As has been mentioned, the unions have just about everything they fought for and have them codified in the federal register. And, as you point out it was the ‘unions’ that provided the wage necessary for a ‘working’ man to provide for his family. You can’t do that on Walmart wages.
If this gets out the Obama regime is finished. And, if there’s a revolution it will be the so-called ‘working man’ and the republican-TPers joining together.
December 17th, 2012 | 10:30 am
Powerful stuff grounded, I think, on this remark:
“Say what you will about UNIONS, they were about protecting a “family wage.”
As has been mentioned, the unions have won just about everything they fought for and have their victories codified in the federal register. And, as you point out it was the ‘unions’ that provided the wage necessary for a ‘working’ man to provide for his family. You can’t do that on Walmart wages.
If this gets out the Obama regime is finished. And, if there’s a revolution it will be the so-called ‘working man’ and the republican-TPers joining together.
December 17th, 2012 | 11:06 am
Sounds very Laschian to me, both in terms of analysis (e.g., symbolic workers versus manual workers) and normative standards (work & love).
December 17th, 2012 | 11:09 am
“Hey, the answer to the economic disconnect between high school graduates and college graduates is to push for EVERYONE graduating from college!” may be the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time, at least since “Hey, the answer to the economic disconnect between homeowners and non-homeowners is to push for EVERYONE to own a home!”
Although it’s probably surpassed by “Hey, the answer to the astronomical rise in college costs is to make it easier for folks to take on massive debt to pay for it!”, which is the dumbest idea since “Hey, the answer to the astronomical rise in housing costs is to make it easier for folks to take on massive debt to pay for it!”
What could possibly go wrong?
December 17th, 2012 | 11:10 am
[...] So I’ve always liked Jonathan Rauch and regarded him as sometimes singularly in touch with the facts. Here’s one example: For the most obvious reason, he’s all for Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
December 17th, 2012 | 11:16 am
Pau;–Lasch remained a kind of Marxist is whole life. Dr. Pat D. is also a kind of Marxist, as are many Porchers. Carey McWilliams not so much. ME not so much, but I thought I’d kind of float this as an yet another kind of antidote to complacent libertarianism and Koch-ism.
December 17th, 2012 | 1:23 pm
What do you think of the sort of Red Tory perspective that says we need to remoralize the market, by which they mean that markets need to be demonopolized in order to allow greater access for the little guy? This would likely also mean decentralization of markets, since local producers would be more likely to be able to compete with coporations who have “monopolized” markets, and thus utilized economies of scale to price out smaller competitors.
From an economic perspective, like all outcome focused interventions, this is likely to have large unintended consequences. Kevin Murphy made this point at an event at the University of Chicago featuring Reinhard Cardinal Marx (http://www.lumenchristi.org/moral_economy/) who argued for “ordo-liberalism” and against “market tyranny.” I was rather surprised by Cardinal Marx’s seeming lack of nuance in discussing economics, given that he was described as “a leading figure in Catholic social thought” and has written pretty extensively on the subject. It sounded like Marx was advocating an expanded form of European social democracy, and the professors of economics at the event pretty much had to explain the basics afterwards. Perhaps Marx’s discussion of economics is more sophisticated elsewhere (he has written a book, playing on his family name, entitled “Das Kapital: A Plea for Man,” which I have not read).
At any rate, although I am no expert on economics, it seems to me there must be some sort of trade off for getting rid of our current growth and low price oriented system and replacing it with something more moral, and thus “more humane.” Having a tv set, car, and a cell phone isn’t necessarily living the high life, but nobody can really deny that our current system doesn’t allow even very poor Americans to have a quality of life very few had 100 years ago, and which is far above that in less “free” places. I wonder just how amenable the working- class men Rauch is concerned about would like an economy that alienated them less but which also made goods more expensive because more local. Philip Blonde has argued that his proposed reforms could be implemented without any loss of prosperity, and in fact he says we would become more prosperous. But I am skeptical, and therefore believe reforms against the economy of continuous growth would be politically difficult.
So maybe Deneen and the Porchers are right to point to just how small we might need to become if we were really to remoralize the economy in order to self govern. But do we really want small when we’ve experienced what it’s like to be big? Will people really want to limit themselves to what’s available locally when they’ve been able to drive a cheap foreign car to the supermarket to buy cheap avocados flown in from Chile in the winter while wearing cheap wool sweaters made in Indonesia?
December 17th, 2012 | 1:35 pm
I’m neither RED nor TORY. I’m also no libertarian. Still, the plan “to remoralize our economy” suggests it really was moral at one time. And the conscious return to “lttle” really would have little to no support, as you say. It’s certainly not the dream of the little guy, but of Porcher intellectuals, literary conservatives, traditionalist Catholics who forget that Christian Democracy can’t really work now etc. If it did magically gain support, government would still screw it up. Then there’s the question of LIBERTY… We’re stuck with GROWTH (which does help us all in some ways–remember I’m no Marxist), not to mention TECHNOLOGY (ditto). Remember how incredibly wrong Pat D was about peak oil, and of course remember how much regular guys love their trucks (which are an indispensable condition of their employment).
December 17th, 2012 | 2:09 pm
“The various solutions Rauch puts forward all seem pretty lame. Eliminating entitlements would hardly address the big problem. Neither would some scheme that would give everyone (an increasingly worthless) college degree.”
This brings up one nagging thing for me about the TV show “Friday Night Lights”: the kids are taught by the guidance counselor Mrs. Taylor that getting a college degree will purchase success. If I remember right in the 5th season Tyra comes back and says that college isn’t that great and she misses the small town and Julie quits college, but I think the message of the previous 4 seasons was absolutely that getting any college degree is the ticket to success (which it isn’t- see the Occupy Wallstreet kids)
December 17th, 2012 | 3:46 pm
The example of TIM RIGGINS showed that college is good if you have a reason to go, which he didn’t. The football at his podunk state school was worse than the PANTHERS and the classes were basically all about textbooks Tim wasn’t equipped to read (and nobody should have to read). The reason he should have been given is that coaches need degrees, of course.
Still, there’s some truth to any college degree is better than none, if less and less.
December 17th, 2012 | 5:34 pm
If we subdivided massive broadacre cash crop land to family size – a la Roepke – milions of working men would be labouring for, investing in, their own property. Done half-way right they and their family would at least gain the leisure of knowing when the sun shone they would be OK for food, fuel and shelter.
Adding human intelligence on the family 5-10 acre scale massively increases biodiversity and productivity –
“Permaculture:Global Gardener youtube videos are instructive. If inclined there’s Natural building blog website + ‘Permies’ bulletin board for an idea.
Once a community of families is established in self sufficiency then enormous amounts of active leisure/creativity is unleashed, instead of the pathology and soul crushing effects of proleterianisation.
And really, with the triumph of the therapeutic elite and disdain of virtue what kind of distributed property is as safe and substantial as land today?
There is a large silent minority that could become a majority groaning for a new Homestead Act.
December 17th, 2012 | 6:33 pm
I think Charles Murray presents the most viable public policy solution in his work “In Our Hands”, where he suggests that all entitlements (Medicare, S.S., corporate welfare, etc.) be eventually eliminated, to be replaced by a yearly payment of $10,000 to those who make under (I think) $50,000 a year ($4000 of the payment would need to go into health care plans). Basically a more extended version of the family assistance programs that guys like Pat Moynihan and Milton Friedman proposed in the past. There are problems galore with this sort of approach of course (e.g. you provide an incentive for out-of-wedlock pregnancy), and politically it is currently a chimera, but really: does anybody have a better idea for increasing blue-collar wages? (Eliminating immigration, improving unions, job-training, greater schools choice that includes vocational training, etc. just won’t be enough, at least in my mind)
December 17th, 2012 | 7:06 pm
Pat D was not wrong about peak oil, nor for that matter was Malthus wrong about peak corn. Not wrong that is within the closed system (from which one can do math). Plus it is just not the long run yet! And Keynes is way smarter than you think. (So is Krugman, best economist you can get for free.)
There also exists a world in which Paul Ryan is right (and that world is state budgets, for entities that are not monetarily sovereign post 1972.). But I actually have more respect for Malthus and Pat D to than I have for Paul Ryan(despite the fact that I might admit Ryan is more sophisticated.) Or put another way I have more respect for actual material determinism. What happens if peak oil stresses peak corn and also leads to peak phosphates and all the derivatives? While there is on some level incredible punch to progressivism, i.e. a copyright, trademark, patent division of the world of intellectual property, one must also even admit that the components of the patent in the field of “corn”, involve a great deal of material +immaterial imputs(fertilizers,water, land use regulation), as does the development of patent in the field of “oil” vis a vis fracking. Almost invariably these broad brush discussions must simply themselves be copyright! In this sense the only economics is itself production. Economics itself risks becomming dismal, preachy and completly worthless copyright!
The idea that any one of us is Marxist is itself rediculous, since Marx himself is simply reduceable to his material imputs, namely a particular protestant background and a severe german academic environment, culminating in a most arduous zombie regiment of pouring over the “mind” of economics, namely hard data or what passed for it at the time, that he could secure from the London Library. Marx himself might even have been Malthusian, but this is not to say much other than the fact that he studied hard and made a prediction about the direction of economic activity given his sense of which trends were indeed material.
In any case I think a true Marxist vis a vis america might say that the use of the term Marxism and progressivism are fully explained by the history of labor law in Wisconsin(and the actual progressive party of Wisconsin), and the eternal recurrance of the rather predictable response of Capital when it perceives threats to the oligopolistic democratic and republican power structure embodied in Joseph McCarthy(as a response to the progressive party) and continuously funded to this day by the Koch brothers. In a very dialectical sense both Kochism and Progressivism built each other, continue to build each other, and continue to McCarthyize each other.
In this sense Marx if you read him carefully never says or claims to have built Capitalism…nor does he ever claim to be engaged in productive activity, in this sense a good chunk of academics are Marxist. Observers, prognosticators, and somewhat uncomfortable with the fact. They will discuss Kochism, or Progressivism, but Lawler is never going to stand on the front lines antagonizing and baiting workers to punch him, so that he can score political points for the Kingdom of Koch. What is the sense of rhetoric after all, if you have to carry the water yourself? At least traditionally american politics consists in issueing fatwa’s, and carrying on with puffery before finally admiting in disgust that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself!
December 17th, 2012 | 7:16 pm
Distributists of the world, Unite!
December 17th, 2012 | 10:04 pm
Distributist slogan contest: Finish “Distributists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your_________.”
I know have about five acres. Please don’t make me farm it!
December 17th, 2012 | 10:45 pm
Oh, I dunno, a fellow with five acres, assuming he can hold it, might do well for himself during the final years of the Obama Administration.
December 18th, 2012 | 8:29 am
“You have nothing to lose but your Sam’s Club card!”
“Hey,hey, ho, ho, upward mobility and brain-drains gotta go!”
December 18th, 2012 | 9:25 am
I actually like “You have nothing to lose but your upward mobility.”–although that would be used by the Koch Brothers when they try to defeat the distributist candidate of the future (who emerges after a techno-collapse makes us more virtuous).
December 18th, 2012 | 10:02 am
Yeah, judging by the floor of his office, we really don’t want to unleash Peter’s talents upon the fields!
December 18th, 2012 | 10:08 am
As for the slogan, Sky Saxon nailed it with his Seeds back in ’66:
Farmer, farmer, farmer, I wanna be jus’ like you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrtD77dmto0
Ol’ 40-million Mao never had anything in his book to top that!
December 18th, 2012 | 10:13 am
But more seriously, Peter, what do you mean by Kochism, anyhow? I know about the deranged conspiracy theories about the Koch conservative philanthropy/activism than about it displaying any remarkably consistent or distinctive conservative philosophy.
December 18th, 2012 | 10:16 am
“Distributists Unite! is an oxymoron”
“Distributist Internationale: The Tyranny of the Local”
“Not Everything Small is Beautiful”
December 18th, 2012 | 10:39 am
I think I would have a far different approach to Marx. The important point is that though we conquered the thought of Lenin, as embodied in the Soviet Union, we never even confronted Marx.
That battle stopped about 1940. And, in America, though we proceeded to extirpate our Marxists (with some major help from the Soviet Union), the people who harried them into silence, penury, or exile were not intellectuals enough to understand that you can suppress the partisans, but you can’t suppress the thought that drives them. You can only refute it.
Nor were they intellectuals enough to take Marx on and refute him. My private opinion is that they were not men enough either. Real men face facts. They also face explanations of them that aren’t very comfortable and take such explanations head on as serious ideas that must be refuted.
Real men are quite rare.
Marx the economist (quite separable from Marx the social visionary and man who predicted the future) is about capital, how capital concentrates in the hands of a few, and why.
The only truly serious intellectual antagonist to Marx the economist is Keynes. And Keynes himself is rather like Einstein, who didn’t refute Newton, but demonstrated that there were cases outside the world of our ordinary sensory observation where Newton didn’t apply. Cases that could be shown to exist through careful experiments. The first of which was the fortuitous discovery that the speed of light was a mathematical constant.
What Keynes did was demonstrate that the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands was not inevitable, but could be forestalled by government action.
He was right. It is an empirical fact that the United States government forestalled the concentration of capital for at least 40 years (1940-1980). It is also an empirical fact that under constant political pressure, the United States government has been slowly but surely abandoning the controls that did this. This political pressure has not let up but, in fact, is still pushing for the United States government to totally renounce all such controls.
It is also an empirical fact that since 1980 capital has been concentrating quite swiftly, much as it did from 1866 to 1940, when this country entered its mature phase of industrial capitalism.
When I say empirical facts, I mean it. Both the numbers and the history are unequivocal. These facts can be evaded, but they will not go away.
And the only two economists to seriously attempt to explain them are Marx and Keynes. Everybody else has been, and still is, evading them.
And as to any axiology, whether religious, ethical, or aesthetic, it has yet to be proved as relevant to the economic facts as we find them or the economic explanations we give for them.
Even in Marx the weakest parts of his theory are the quasi-ethical ones, such as the implicit assumption that their exists a “just price” for goods and services.
Or, to quote Berholt Brecht, food first, then ethics.
December 18th, 2012 | 11:26 am
“I actually like “You have nothing to lose but your upward mobility.””
I don’t get the overt hostility towards distributism that is so rampant here. Most of the sorts of things that Pete’s been talking about in his posts are perfectly compatible with the idea of dispersing property, ownership, etc., as widely as possible, which is really what distributism is all about.
Of course we’re not going to all become small-hold farmers, but they have far more to offer than is reflected in the dismissive attitudes on display here.
December 18th, 2012 | 11:53 am
So Brian I tried to say the hostility wasn’t mine by attributing to the wholly imaginary Koch camaign of the future. My hostility to the Kochs is meant to be equally playful and refer to the conspiracy theory. I have to admit, though, I’m not in favor of teaching Ayn Rand as real literature. And if I have any real hostility it would be spendng so much money so stupidly and so losing the election. I’m not against small farming for those who want to do it (not me), just as a general solution it just probably won’t work. There are some great and some quaint things–like the indispensable peasantry–in Roepke too. So if you look at the record above–I managed to defend both the libertarian/Kochians and the distributists both. No wonder ratings aren’t so good. A more charitable spin would be I’m trying to be fair and balanced and so not taking either side too seriously while seeing they both have some great points.
Other slogans
…you have nothing to lose but your processed food.
…you have nothing to lose but being after virtue.
…you have nothing to lose but eating dinner at McDonalds on Christmas.
December 18th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
Brian, I’m teasing, not exhibiting hostility. It is true that as a critical ideal or standard, I find its adherents often are less-than-equitable to the status-quo, and their presentation of their ideals tends to ignore significant problems, both theoretical and practical. I do not believe that the natural and/or supernatural vocation of most human beings is farming. But the main point: I was going with the flow, not making an argument or delivering a critique.
December 18th, 2012 | 1:29 pm
Isn’t the obvious answer “You have nothing to lose but your iphones/ipads”? Or are we imagining a world of yeoman farms with hi-tech global connections.
I too appreciate Rauch’s concerns. But rather than attempting a return to the 1800, couldn’t we aim at something more like (I do not say just like) 1959? The main depredations of global capitalism lie in the atomizing of the family (which of course Marx welcomed). What tax and welfare policies would best incentivize mothers staying home (mostly) with small children, and thus (yes!) depending upon the fathers of their children? I am not a Marxist because I see the acids of capitalism, but I think they are abetted by the acids of ideology: feminist, liberationist, etc. — and that we can see the lived meaning (that is the devastation) of such ideology and choose against it. That said, we mustn’t ignore the economic basis of mild patriarchy, and I welcome all measures (that don’t include ressentiment towards the wealthy) to support something like a “living wage” within real marriages.
December 18th, 2012 | 1:48 pm
So it would difficult to imagine Dr. Pat without his smart phone and computer. Same with all those Porchers.
Is the return to MILD PATRIARCHY possible? Divide up into small groups (each led by a man, of course) and discuss.
December 18th, 2012 | 8:17 pm
As our future may belong to collectives of techno-elite and not to those professors in the antiquated university system; Mr.Lawler, why exactly should the working class put up with YOU? Why should us worker-barbarians not notice that it is the YOUse preserving an unjust credential system to maintain the status-quo, when most of those techno-elite skills aren’t acquired in a classroom? You force us into classrooms; make us go into debt; possibly arrest or retard or techno-proficiencies (lowering our chances of success in the new regime) and force us worker-barbarians to pledge allegiance to an old hierarchy (What practical good are the Harvards and Oxfords in a techno-future? In the last two weeks alone; I, with no background in computer programming at all, have learned how to program simple arcade games without the help of YOU and your great institutes.)
Us worker-barbarians may be better off hanging the lot of YOUse out to dry.
…I am being melodramatic, but an international socialist today may notice that western nations have been progressively defined more fully as their universities beginning at the 2nd Council of Lyons in the 13th century. What else has kept the revolution from occurring? Those intellectual laborers (you among them) maintain a faux-egalitarian, unjust and repressive hierarchy which developed all those modern customs and conventions that harm the goals of the international socialist’s vanguard and oppress the proletariat by keeping them alienated from the state; yet at the same time, the marriage of nation and state brought about by the universities makes less and less sense: I no longer go to Oxford to become a member of the Oxbridge class; educated to enliven my sense of the English spirit and taught to rule justly in the ways and customs an Englishman would. Instead,I am buying a name based on an arbitrary heritage of what an Oxbridge education used to be. It’s a name that shouldn’t bring me the merit it does.
My worker-barbarian would look at the milieu that passes for “society” and ask why he should buy into a great books education while living among this? Why he should buy into the idea that meritocracy is true equality and not a right-wing scheme to sneak old customs and prejudices into the present? What makes your university a judge of what is merited? Why should I take you as a master of books and knowledge when I see this techno-elite either blowing you off or approaching the great yearnings with their self-mastery of techniques? While I watch these techno-elite form families and networks beyond national bonds and I’m stuck with my spade, pickaxe and nationality. So isn’t the quintessential national institute a suckers game now?
December 19th, 2012 | 6:00 pm
MPB, just so you know, most Great Books-oriented profs, such as Peter, moi, and yeah, even Patrick Deneen despite his denials, have, comparatively speaking, little to no power within their institutions, and thus over the overall shape of higher learning in the U.S. And half the ones that do have some power are boomer-mind-setted left-leaners who usually find other ways of screwing education up, at least from a pomocon perspective. The truth is the GB-oriented profs have largely lost, even if there is an faux-elitism at most institutions that would be too embarrassed to finally snuff them out. To kill that moribund classics dept., for example. Had our kind won the war in decades past, or even just held the trenches, there might be some of the sincere elitism you seem to want to decry. But today’s elitism is a different beast.
Empowered GB-profs would have been less likely, I do think, to have propagated this debt-scam thing. Your dorm room and gym would stink, you could never get anyone on the phone, we profs would have fewer conferences and less pay, but you would learn some collection of Emerson, Plutarch, Donne and such, without the massive debt.
But, it didn’t happen that way.
Oh, and it’s probably even worse in Europe, and the other nations for whom liberal education is an option remain tentative and uncertain about its value and very substance.
December 19th, 2012 | 7:32 pm
MPB’s rant reminds us that doctrinaire existence acts to derail the mind. For people like this, it is one very short step to the kind of violence recently experienced in Conn. When MPB and his ilk speak of ‘revolution’, like Obama’s mentor, they are prepared to slaughter 25 million Americans or more, if that’s what it takes to satisfy the inhuman ideological requirements.
Remember this ‘revolutionary movement’ has long collapsed into a world-immanent reality. Consequently, even in teaching the truth of the ‘tension of existence’ found in the olde books and symbols, it is more than likely that our revoutionary friend, existing in a false and demonic reality could never comprehend.
December 20th, 2012 | 12:05 am
Mr.Cheeks,
I find your response to my tongue-in-cheek rant in the voice of a socialist-worker character highly colorful. I am not sure how you manage to corral recent events, revolution, and Obama all into one post while accusing me of a doctrinaire existence and dessicated mind.
Mr.Lawler has been making a case for the importance of a more classically based education and, sincerely, I am on board. I believe this case is related to the plight of workers, or the non-Bohemian Bourgeoisie among us.
What I attempted to capture through caricature is a point we both agree on; “remember this ‘revolutionary movement’ has long collapsed into a world-immanent reality” and has already caused its damage. Our great books [and their professors too!] may need saving; but our institute for teaching them may be too bedraggled to be worth it.
Our socialist friends rightly point out that what we have now is a broken vehicle where the old ways are held onto (or connivingly smuggled in the eyes of Marxists) as some sort of Thurmidor Reaction. I believe us conservatives would indeed find common cause in viewing it as a broken vehicle and agree that it is not doing what it was meant to do.
As persuasive as Mr.Lawler has been in his blog posts (both here and at Big Think) about the need for a university education with the classics; for me, his very arguments undermine supporting or patronizing the universities we have. I find Mr.Lawler more subversive on this than he intends. And he doesn’t need to be a Marxist to see that the “new” ways have been more aggressive in stamping out the worker than the old ways ever were- and those ‘new’ ways are coming from our universities. So I do not find it a stretch to say that the worker; the international socialist; and the great-book conservative may find common cause and mutual interest in seeing this institute of learning pass away.
December 20th, 2012 | 11:44 am
thanks MPB for letting us know where your tongue was. I just liberated your second post from SPAM. I’m more subversive than I intend sort of corresponds to building better than they knew. But because the point of the post was that I’m old and “we’ve lost”–and only a fool would get a PhD in “liberal arts” right now–it’s true that I very consciously have no faith in the future of our univesities. Maybe a college here and there in the sticks…
December 20th, 2012 | 12:49 pm
Thanks for straightening me out, MPB. However, my effort at analysis stands, at least in terms of what appears to be ‘world-immanent consciousness’ and all that, which is the ground of your derailment, or at least the fundamental derailment of our Left-progressivist friends.
I see Dr. Lawler’s efforts, and those of his friends, as an attempt to, not only restore the empirical and revelatory truth/knowledge gained by the classical, Judeo-Christian, and contemporary philosophers, theologians, and regular smart dudes/dudettes but a philosopher who seeks to move philosophy forward as a means to expanding the knowledge and wisdom gained throughout history and in resisting evil.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact