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On the Limits of Professional Expertise
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 9:18 AM

Matt Feeney has a great, tart post on Tiger Woods, which I nonetheless want to take in another direction. For Matt,

the prevailing sentiment unleashed over the last few weeks is not, in the most immediate sense, some reflex of racial loathing that we white people have been holding in store in anticipation of this moment. It’s disappointment – disappointment in Tiger Woods as a higher sort of regular guy, disappointment that what he seemed to illustrate about the essential soundness and stability of our most important and worried-about institution, he didn’t illustrate at all, that he was living in the bad old days we’re constantly telling ourselves we’d left behind, and living it up.

Perhaps, but here’s what I think. We’re less disappointed to see Tiger represent evidence that our marriages often fall far short of the ideal than we are chagrined and dismayed to see Tiger represent evidence that putting most of our effort into a life of demonstrated professional expertise will leave us with the sort of meaning deficit that nags in the kind of way that causes us to do reckless, irresponsible, indulgent, and, yes, even depraved things.

UPDATE: I’ve raised a few questions. Rather than linking to the tweets — shudder — I’ll just add a few remarks to the above. First, I don’t mean to imply that there is no meaning to be found in building professional expertise. Matt Crawford’s account of the way manual competence conduces to human flourishing through specifically professional relationships is, to my mind, beyond dispute. Indeed, in comments at a Georgetown panel on the purpose of college, Matt went on to rightly specify that professional expertise supplies people with the necessary conditions of mere life, too: there’s nothing wrong with chasing dollars by accumulating expertise in order to stay solvent — or even in order to build some wealth, necessarily. Certainly chasing dollars as an end in itself is a misunderstanding and evidence of what I called a ‘meaning deficit’ above. But that’s not the problem Tiger illustrates for us.

Tiger has created or unveiled a problem by undermining the whole logic of virtue derived from his professional expertise. It’s that expertise that’s imbued his ‘brand’ with such enormous, unprecedented value. It’s that expertise that’s caused big elite firms like Accenture to rent his identity, promising customers the experience of being ‘a Tiger’. That experience involves extreme confidence under highly structured but complex and changing conditions, and the superlative results that come from routine high performance under those conditions. These capabilities, and the outcomes they produce, are great, celebrated virtues today. Much is invested in them. Although they’re increasingly valued in men and women, they’re more relevant and important to men. The goods associated with Tiger have value primarily as external goods, for the rewards that come to those who demonstrate and display them. But they also have value as internal goods. When the general experience of confidently navigating sophisticated challenge sets so as to competitively produce outstanding solutions can be experienced specifically within a particular challenge set to which one has dedicated one’s life energy, some kind of self-actualization is understood to ensue in which the competitor (and, vicariously, his fans) partake of the fullness of individuality in all its romantic glory.

Not one, then, but two types of meaning. To our great dismay, Tiger was driven to extremes of adultery despite accessing both these kinds of (still particularly male) meaning to an almost utopian degree. To be sure, for some professional athletes, that combo pack of meaning seems to be enough to keep them from slipping into sybaritic dementia. But Tiger is not some athletes. Tiger is the incarnation of our noble ideal. And he calls into question our ability to build lives of adequate meaning around participation in one of the many competitive showcases designed to organize and reward those (especially men) willing to discipline themselves into logging thousands upon thousands of hours of practice. Not only does he cast doubt on the ultimate value of the external goods of professional expertise; he casts doubt on the ultimate value of its internal goods, too.


Murder, He Lied
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 9:00 AM

Ross is right to come down on Ezra for reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating on health care. But let me dot the i here.

Ezra Klein kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy by accusing Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” That “hundreds of thousands” refers to the number of Americans who die every decade because they don’t have health insurance — or rather, it refers to one study’s estimate of that number. Other studies, cited by Michael Cannon and John Goodman, suggest that the number is considerably closer to zero — or else that the link between health insurance and mortality might be too murky too penetrate. But of course there are still other studies that tend to confirm Ezra’s numbers …

Anyway, without trying to adjudicate these competing claims, I’ll just say that I would be very surprised if extending health insurance coverage didn’t have some positive effect on life expectancy for the newly-insured. And what’s more, I think liberals are absolutely right to be laying their emphasis on this point: It’s the best argument (and, indeed, increasingly the only argument) in favor of the current legislation. But I think Ezra’s missing the point when he acts puzzled that anyone who accepts his statistics would object to the way he went after Lieberman.

[...]

In this regard, the claim that “health care reform will save lives” is very, very different from the statement that “opponents of health care legislation are willing to let hundreds of thousands of Americans die.” The two may be factually similar, but only the latter waves the bloody shirt. And the bloody shirt is the enemy of both reasonable debate and good lawmaking. It’s a conversation-killer, and a policy destroyer.

Ross is too kind in allowing Ezra’s original language — Lieberman will cause people to die — to translate freely with the more accurate language of letting people die. This isn’t simply a matter of grammar or style. Ezra did not attack Lieberman for supporting a bill which would merely get out of the way while some significant number of Americans happened to die. He attacked him for seeming “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Anyone who doesn’t support the right bill, you see, is killing Americans. And since this is obvious, you see, anyone who doesn’t support the right bill wants to kill those Americans, and wants them to die.

This is more than moral grandstanding or shirt-waving. It’s an intentional distortion of an ethical precept at the very foundation of our philosophy of law. It’s a lie mobilized to discredit one’s political opponents, not just politically but morally. In truth, of course, to kill a bill that would prevent people from dying is not to kill those people — just as refraining from saving a person in mortal peril is not causing them to die. Any law student who didn’t sleep through torts can tell you this distinction is essential. Though it rankles morally, the fundamental legal and philosophical distinction between letting somebody die and causing their death avoids the systemic injustice involved in forcing individuals to be Good Samaritans. Two key points emerge. We must be free not to act morally in order to act morally. And the sort of discernment that enables individuals to decide whether or not to act in a specific moral instance cannot be properly cultivated without that freedom. I suppose there’s a third point: we ought to continue to live in a world in which individuals can and do cultivate that kind of moral discernment.

All this can’t be bulldozed away in the name of any piece of legislation, or in the name of preventing any kind of present or future suffering. That’s not to suggest that Republicans or conservatives or whomever should pretend that Democratic health care reform wouldn’t actually lessen or eliminate the suffering of some number of Americans or save some statistically significant number of lives. The problem is that knowing this doesn’t settle the issue of whether it’s the right reform. Where Ross sees a conversation-stopper in the claim that opposing the current bill means being willing to let people die, I see the start of a crucial conversation. After all, as Ross notes, “Every side of every debate [...] can plausibly accuse its opponents of being ‘objectively pro-death.’” Nobody really requires that every policy and every law be structured above all to maximize the prevention of suffering and death, because, ultimately, the minimization of suffering and death is not the purpose of politics or even the definition of justice.

None of which is to say, to be sure, that we have no moral interest in mitigating suffering or decreasing our number of untimely deaths. We have a profound and inescapable moral interest, of course; one which conflicts in likewise inescapable fashion with our interest in political liberty and prudent governance. Ultimately, the stewardship of those goods has a moral character of its own. To speak and act as if there is no moral tension at the heart of the politics of health care is to give in to the temptation to deny that we ourselves, as citizens and human beings, have to suffer that tension.


The Delusional Future of Free Association
Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 8:49 AM

Kyle draws my attention to these lines from Robin Hanson, who calls “our era the most consistently and consequentially deluded and unadaptive of any era ever:”

When they remember us, our distant descendants will be shake their heads at the demographic transition, where we each took far less than full advantage of the reproductive opportunities our wealth offered.  They will note how we instead spent our wealth to buy products we saw in ads that talked mostly about the sort of folks who buy them.  They will lament our obsession with super-stimili that highjacked our evolved heuristics to give us taste without nutrition.   They will note we spent vast sums on things that didn’t actually help on the margin, such as on medicine that didn’t make us healthier, or education that didn’t make us more productive.

[...]

Perhaps most important, our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices that our highly integrated rapidly changing world did or might have allowed us to achieve, and the strange delusions that influenced such choices.  These choices might have been about global warming, rampaging robots, nuclear weapons, bioterror, etc.  Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants.  This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.

And then I come upon this, courtesy of Thrillist:

Eerie, but true: somebody out there looks just like you. Find out who with the Coke Zero Facial Profiler: a next-level social networking tool that uses law enforcement-level analysis to find your doppelganger, wherever he/she/it might be. Seriously — it does this, and lets you contact them too.


Europe’s Europe Moment
Monday, December 7, 2009, 11:13 AM

Ross’s take on Europe and Islam focuses deftly on the democratic deficit behind the Continent’s integration problem:

this political style — forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops — is [...] how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.

It seems clear enough that the anti-democratic approach characteristic of Europe’s bureaucratic elites calls into question the legitimacy of its outcomes. But more significant is the degree to which that approach undermines their stability and durability. In our moments of democratic weakness, we flatter ourselves that legitimacy is the foundation of stable, durable institutions. We suppose this to be true because we take the legitimacy conferred by democratic politics to be authoritative. But Europe’s own voters seem bent on reminding us that what’s authoritative isn’t always democratic — or legitimate from a democratic perspective. Europe’s elite-driven unification draws its claims to legitimacy from an entirely different well: the authority of the European Union, which itself in turn draws its authority from the idea of a Europe single and whole.

This idea is almost as old as Europe itself. But implementing it has proven troublesome to say the least. Every person, nation, or movement to exercise the agency of unification has brought tragedy to the Continent — and has failed. European unification today has to be understood as the attempt to satisfy Europe’s fundamental longing by recourse to a brilliant, bizarre fiction: handing over the task of unification to an institutional agent without any true identity, neither personal, national, nor ideological. Indeed, to satisfy this essential identity-less criterion, European unification cannot even be popular.

As uncanny as it all seems to observers across the pond, inclined as they are toward skepticism and pessimism over this European project, Americans should recognize the stakes and the alternative. Europe’s ‘minaret moment’ is illustrative. Though more democracy might have mitigated Europe’s immigration and integration woes, more democracy would surely have left Europe less integrated, more divided, and more directionless than it is today — even less equipped and prepared to handle its shared challenges (and opportunities). With a few exceptions, the nation-states of Europe proved themselves unable to succeed in practice, or even to justify their own existence in theory. Success and justification — stability and durability grounded in authority — required more; and that’s what the European Union has provided. Critics wonder if the EU is enough. The answer is yes, but only if the EU accomplishes the only task that justifies its own existence. And though the voters of Europe have shown a basic interest in proactively marching unification down the field, Europe’s citizens themselves cannot and will not usurp the European project from their identity-less bureaucratic elites. It sounds strange and paradoxical in the extreme, but the likelihood is that European unification cannot become popular in a democratic way until after the fact.

On their own, the voters of Europe have not earned the trust and credibility necessary to mobilize and execute the European project — their own trust and credibility! Europe’s bureaucratic elite must recognize that it is a means to an end, and not an end in itself; but American critics of that elite ought to admit that putting Europe’s future at the disposal of its citizens might well have landed the Continent in even direr straits than it’s in today.


Therapy and the Military, Redux
Monday, December 7, 2009, 10:15 AM

Continuing coverage:

“To me,” Mr. Meehan said, “the healing power of being able to write through everything, talk through everything, really helped me make order of it.”

“That’s something I know is going to be one of the tragic long-lasting effects of the Fort Hood incident,” he said. “Soldiers will feel they can’t come forward to confess things. And that’s a bad road to be on.”


Of Friction and Frictionlessness
Thursday, November 19, 2009, 8:37 PM

Ross is back — as a blogger, that is, after a well-deserved six-month hiatus. Riffing off of Peter’s lament that “our political debates will become indistinguishable from our health care debates,” becoming “permanently intertwined, going on and on, forever and ever, cable news without end,” Ross adds:

If I may borrow a theme from one of my recent columns, this is exactly what you’d expect politics to look like at the End of History: A permanent wrestling match over how best to divide up the spoils of progress, of which life-saving and life-extending treatments are the most valuable by far. It’s a testament to human achievement, obviously — science’s power over nature, capitalism’s triumphs over scarcity — that this kind of “who gets to live longest” wrestling match is even possible. But since the stakes are literally life and death, it stands to reason that the more power the government has to divvy up health care dollars, the more rancorous these debates will get.

If I may borrow an observation from one of my recent discussion sections, where I’ve taken a score of undergraduates on a brief tour of John Stuart Mill, this is exactly the sort of politics you’d expect if Mill, not the end of history, triumphed. In the column he references, Ross suggests

that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is — like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes. Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction. Not that we want to experience this destruction ourselves. But we want it to be at least a possibility — as a spur to virtue, and as a punishment for sin.

Hence the penitent schlock of 2012 and associated entries in our great common collection of apocalypse porn. But consider that the frisson we get from our visions of ruin rubs, as it were, both ways: as a tremendous crunch of energy that sweeps away the torpor and stasis of our frictionless lifeworld, yes, but also as a vast release from the grinding pressure of the seemingly endless frictions that all the infinite coasting in the world can’t seem to eradicate. We sense a double fate that’s the worst of both worlds — all the grueling work and exhaustive detail of politics and policy today plus, from the perspective of the only partial sanctuaries we retreat into after hours, all the large-scale enervation and rootlessness of a culture without a telos. We take a look at, say, China — innocent in its exuberance, too busy living to care — and we sigh a very honest but only partially sincere sigh of jealousy. Michael Oakeshott’s ship of state, sailing on a course not even fated across an uncharted sea, turns out not to be a luxury cruise liner, no matter how hard we try to achieve the interactive zen of the Nation of Why Not. Someone has to pull those oars. Or shovel that coal. Or — alas! — refresh that gmail.

Mill, I think, knew this well enough. His project — like Tocqueville’s, though in a rather different way — was to preserve not just the possibility but the actuality of greatness in a time when we, whomever we are, are stuck with democracy. (Democracy, that is, meaning an inexorably self-consolidating and extending equality of conditions.) Both Mill and Tocqueville recognized that democracy altered the terms by which human greatness could be preserved, not just because democracy took away certain possibilities for greatness but because it affirmatively changed what it meant for a human being to be great. Yet where Tocqueville was wistful about the future of geniuses, certain that mores would soften and soften under democracy and worried that the springs of action would weaken along with them, Mill thought a certain kind of genius to be not only a rare type of greatness possible under democracy but one positively encouraged by it. Our crazy mixed-up world was to be loved in spite of its costs and consequences because it threw up, or threw off like sparks, a certain heretofore impossible kind of genius, one both encumbered and unencumbered by circumstances and his (or her) fellows like never before.

Nietzsche would describe this kind of genius and greatness as simply a matter of bearing, yet overcoming, all the ‘parasites’ of contemporary life — in this respect not too far off the mark from Mill. Yet Nietzsche recognized the way in which genius was the type of greatness most susceptible to democratization in a lowering, not elevating way. Mill seems to have missed this critical point completely. Nietzsche, prefiguring Freud, realized that theatrical genius — the ‘charisma’ of the actor — resonated with and reaffirmed the animating desires of democratic individuals in a way that led them toward a celebration of the release of energy that accompanied great increases and decreases of friction or tension itself. And since Nietzsche was a clever psychologist, he knew that our sensitivity to suffering was, no matter how much we devoted ourselves politically to the eradication of cruelty, relative: an ornate, sophisticated, subtle taste for experiencing the motion across the friction gradient — from rubbing ourselves and one another the wrong way to the right way and vice versa — would grow culturally prominent, probably dominant.

Now: while liberals like Tocqueville, Mill, Constant, and others feared above all that even hedonically active democratic indivduals would slip into torpor and a new barbarism by encouraging and accepting the rise of a despot, Nietzsche’s sinophobia (for all these theorists incessantly raised the specter of ‘oriental despotism’ in the face of our democratic future) extended to the fate awaiting the uncreative, bourgeois last man, but not to the democratic individual whose only faith was, as Rieff puts it in reference to Napoleon, “to his unrealized selves alone.” Where Mill and Tocqueville would look upon Napoleon as a death sentence for human greatness in democratic times — a recipe for frictionless, soft despotism — Nietzsche saw Napoleonic rule as the consequence and the cause of profound inner frictions, a clash of inner selves too psychically demanding and alluring to leave much time, energy, or interest for political participation.

The intertwining of our clashes over culture, politics, and science may go on indefinitely, but not without periodic resolutions or decisive victories and defeats. The fear that no side can win anymore, not even for a fleeting generation, is unwarranted. It is not so much fear as a guilty feeling attendant upon our hope that no side — including, of course, ours — will lose.


Culture, Anti-Culture, and Lists
Monday, November 16, 2009, 9:45 AM

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right. — Umberto Eco (via, via)

Talk about bad examples. Mozart’s librettist, an amazing and in some respects ominous figure, used the Don to dramatize very near the opposite of what Eco claims. Da Ponte was born and raised Jewish; before his Catholic conversion, his name was Emanuele Conegliano. He was well-educated. Any learned Catholic Jew writing a Don Giovanni libretto knows well enough where the Don came from — the Spanish priest Tirso de Molina, whose Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest brought Don Juan into the world. Trickster is too coy a word for the Don, one the Don would use himself to mask what he is. The Don, with his lists, counts his conquests (i.e., rapes and cruel seductions) of women (and girls) as conquests of the world. But the Don’s conquests bring death, not life, to culture. The Don’s stone guest is the ghost of Don Gonzalo, the father of yet another poor conquest, who tried to avenge her honor but failed to kill the Don. But the stone guest is also Fate, whom the Don mocks and defies. Fate gets him in the end. The Don is an agent of destruction; to rebel against death and damnation, he deals death and dishonor. The Don is not trying to reconcile himself to the infinite but to use finitude as a weapon against that which endures. The Don must know his war on the very foundations of culture is ‘futile’ from his own point of vantage. He will mock and deride daughters, fathers, and Fate until whichever day, whether near or far, some combination of the three catch up with and destroy him. No matter how he lowers, parodies, and disgraces, order (and, in a Christian formulation beyond the pagan one of Fate, grace) will prevail. Yet the Don carries on. The Don is a nihilist. Masquerading as a great achiever of culture, he is actually a scourge of culture. His defense of his list is just as Eco hints — those seductions are, merely, ‘completely practical’. The achievement of that line of argument is not cultural but anti-cultural.

UPDATE: Read Alan’s selections from Auden’s “Infernal Science”! The difference between an itemized list of provisions or words and a list of conquests or captives or kills is a difference between the life and death of culture because it is the difference between not cursing and cursing unique persons and souls. The Don curses by reducing persons to numbers — and there is no consolation in the ‘specificity’ of being, say, the 7th victim of a rapist, the 284,341st victim of a Great Leader, or the 1,984th score of a sexual athlete.


The Touch, The Feel of Patienthood
Monday, November 16, 2009, 9:04 AM

At Ft. Hood’s “Spiritual Fitness Center”, the therapeutic’s trying to change warrior culture one triumph at a time:

on the vast Army post cloaked in drab, Fort Hood’s new Spiritual Fitness Center offers color. Inside, sunlight filters through stained glass of lavender and blue. Candles are surrounded in dishes of polished stones and George Winston piano solos flow from speakers above.

“We like to call this place ‘listening and love,’ ” Lt. Col. Ira Houck, a chaplain, explained from deep in an overstuffed armchair, one week after the shootings left 13 people dead and dozens wounded.

If the concept sounds New Age, it is. The converted chapel in the heart of the newly christened Resiliency Campus offers a refuge for broken and distressed soldiers.

Yet Sgt. Matthew Spencer, a combat veteran who works as a greeter at the center, laughs when he says he and his buddies would never seek help here.

H/T: Matt Frost. Tocqueville would point out that the Ft. Hood psychologist who blames the military’s “macho culture” for reactions like Sgt. Spencer’s really means its honor culture.


The Banality Kerfuffle
Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 9:08 AM

I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin Romano’s recent hit job on Heidegger, Menashi makes the point which I noted had gone entirely unmade in the long, hysterical combox criticism aimed at Romano: even Strauss, Heidegger’s great foe, insisted we couldn’t wave him away. This is relevant even for those who think Strauss and Heidegger were merely the Spy vs. Spy of Nietzscheans.)

So, since Steve has done most of the talking for me, I’ll let — who else? — Rieff do the rest:

…when the human lowers itself in the vertical of authority, there is always the shock of the revelation that that lowering can scarcely be called animal. Such lowerings as went under the category of sin or transgression were beneath baseness. They were nothing. Hannah Arendt calls this nothing the ‘banality of evil.’ And she is correct, so long as one understands the nothing of banality, its meaninglessness. It is the kind of transgression which the transgressor cannot recognize as a transgression. So the human, as transgressor, once the very idea of transgression is repressed, has fallen through the bottom of sacred order (Crisis of the Officer Class, 161-62).


Prospects for Secularists
Monday, November 2, 2009, 10:09 AM

Over at Secular Right, David Hume has words for our PAL:

Though the author of Atheist Delusions is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, Lawler reports that his criticism of the New Atheists starts from a Nietzschian perspective. All I have to say is that homey don’t play that game. Friedrich Nietzsche was the product of a line of Lutherans pastors, so it should not surprise that his atheism engages so directly, and inverts so forcefully, the thrust of Christianity. As philosophy goes much of what Nietzsche had to say was captivating, but then I also find science fiction captivating, as well as some portions of the Bible.

The atheism of Nietzsche plays on the terms of Christianity, and that is why Christians often admire his work. It is entirely intelligible to them insofar as it operates in the same universe of morals, albeit characterized by inversions. So naturally Christians castigate atheists who are not Nietzschians, such a stance creates much greater difficulty in fashioning rhetorical thrusts. Too many presuppositions simply are not aligned. Where Lawler and many others declare that Christianity is a necessary precondition of humane values, I simply assert that humane values, or more accurately the values we hold today, used Christianity, as well as other religions and philosophies, as cultural vessels. Morality and ethics existed prior to religion, and the emergence of “Higher Religions” which fused a moral sense with supernatural intuitions was a process which occurred in the light of history [DH's bold]. It was no miracle, and may even have been inevitable once humans reached a particular level of organization.

Of course this sort of argument leaves many loose ends hanging. So be it. Those who believe that they have the Ultimate answer do not, and yet we continue to muddle on.

In comments, he states further that

i’m just really tired of christians telling me what i should believe [ditto] if i’m not going to be a christian.

The passage in which Hume thinks Lawler told him what he should believe seems to be this:

Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that.

Now, I am all for religious/secular understanding, but I think Lawler’s key word, “unsustainable,” was really not intended at all to apply to individuals. At the level of the individual — that is, of at least some individuals — secular morality of the sort associated with Christianity minus Christ (and God, etc.) is often quite sustainable. Clearly even Nietzsche conceded that the sentimental bluestockings of the world — to use Nietzsche’s language — could carry on in fine post-Christian ethical style for a good long while: either until a world-historical poop-out at the exhausted and enervated end of history, or until some ruddier race or tribe came along and wiped Mr. and Ms. Well-Adjusted Secular Bourgeois into the dustbin of history that Machiavelli associated with the once-flourishing but now forgotten Etruscans.

The broader issue is that smart political theologists have always conceded the same point: there is always a more or less small number of individuals who are able to live pretty well on Earth without recourse to religion. Usually this has been on account of philosophy; but the idea developed that the philosopher could not secure the good life for the many without taking away their liberty. So a project emerged aimed at extending a reasonably good life to the many without imposing either religious or philosophical authority upon them. As far as this political project is concerned, the stakes are high indeed; the number of secularists who are content to secure a good life for themselves while consigning the rest of their fellow man to ignorance and false consciousness seems fixed at a lower level than the number of secularists who can secure a good life for themselves. In brief, ethically humanist secularists have to find it impossible to live well as self-realized parasites on a social order with religious foundations. The internal logic of their morality requires a mission, however incremental, to bring the good (secular) life to the masses.

Secularists of a more Nietzschean persuasion, of course, might find exactly this realization the very condition of possibility for living well. (Cesare Borgia as Pope — is he understood?) Hume’s assertion that our ‘religious phase’ may have been the “inevitable” precondition or ‘vessel’ of secular morality (it isn’t clear whether he means naturally or historically inevitable) can’t get the ethical humanist secularist around the more haunting question of whether the secular political project of mass ethical secularism is viable, much less sustainable — especially if that social order is not to be grounded in philosophy, and especially if the politics in question must, as apparently it must, be one grounded in rights to freedoms.

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