We are bound together through a web of consensual contracts between individuals who—free by nature—are able to calculate what’s best for them in light of their interests. The fundamental transformational fact—the one that produced modern government, modern technology, and the modern economy—is personal freedom understood as individual freedom. That freedom is for securing one’s own life, one’s own liberty, and one’s own pursuit of happiness. Individuals are, as later philosophers said, autonomous beings; each of them lives for or lays down the law for himself, for what he sees as his own good.

Our Darwinian, evolutionary scientists have shown that the individualistic understanding of who we are is obviously incomplete. We are, in truth, not free individuals, but social animals. We actually find happiness, in most cases, by understanding ourselves as parts of wholes bigger than ourselves, as members of groups, families, communities, countries, churches, and so forth. We’re hardwired, so to speak, with social instincts or desires, and to unnaturally deny those desires is to be free to pursue happiness but never find it.

Locke was wrong to think of each of us as living detached from natural social instinct and manipulating nature for one’s own use from some undisclosed location. Actually, most Darwinians don’t think Locke was completely wrong on the level of description. Our hardwiring pushes us toward both satisfying individual needs and, in some sense, the flourishing of the species. But as social animals, our evolutionary psychologists can’t help but conclude, we are most of all natural parts; even our individualistic inclinations have some social or species function. In some deeply natural sense, Locke’s personal thought was completely wrong. Our species has flourished–or come to dominate the other species–not because of the techno-freedom displayed by individuals, but because we are the most “eusocial” of the highly intelligent animals.

We conservatives respect and benefit from what we can really learn from science. And our Lockean and Darwinian theorists have both taught us a lot about who we are. Still, we also notice that science in our “enlightened” time tends too readily to morph into scientism, a kind of too-easy-to-understand or radically oversimplified account of all that exists, a kind of self-help doctrine based on what “studies show” as promulgated by experts. As an antidote to scientism, we play the Lockeans and Darwinians off against each other, showing that each form of scientism or ideology explains less—much less–than its expert advocates thinks it does.

We agree with the Lockeans that we are free persons, and that our behavior can’t be explained anywhere near completely by the Darwinian accounts of animal behavior in general. Each of us is not simply a part of nature (or species or some other “group” such as the “city” or even the family); we have irreducible personal identities. But the Lockeans are wrong to think that personal identity isn’t relational. Even consciousness, we remember, is “knowing with” others; only a personal and relational being could possess logos—or real openness to the truth about the way things really are. So it’s in particular places—including particular institutions—where you know and love particular people that you come to know who you are as a particular being open to the universal truth. In this sense, we think that the Deistic view of God is illogical or anti-logical, if God (or any other person) is understood to be a rational and creative being.

The choice between being a free (or unnatural) individual and merely a dispensable part of some species that our Lockeans and Darwinians seem to give us just doesn’t square with the facts we can see with our eyes. Each of us can be an authentic part of various communities without surrendering irreducible personal identity. It is within such communities, after all, that we are seen as significant persons. Not only that, real personal identity becomes a disorienting burden when one gets too locked up in oneself. That’s why Alexis Tocqueville thought that the excessive emotional individualism of some Americans is the cause of their surrendering their personal sovereignty to “public opinion,” schoolmarmish bureaucrats, and impersonal expertise. Persons—being with names who can name—irresponsibly attempt to surrender what they really know about who they are to anonymous forces.

A “relational” human being can be distinguished from a merely social bee, ant, or even chimp, just as human love can easily be distinguished sexual and pair-bonding instincts given to the other animals. Both the Lockeans and the Darwinians don’t even begin to give an adequate account of personal eros. It’s understanding love as merely a social instinct that’s responsible for Lockeans, especially Lockean feminists and transhumanists, and so forth, concluding that love sucks, because it’s for suckers.

We conservatives remember that the creative logos of God himself was animated by personal love, and it’s that sort of animation that’s responsible for the most magnificent forms of human creativity, even techno-creativity. And we conservatives remember that everyone used to know that Socrates was the most erotic and the freest man in Athens, even as we remember that he had certain relational “issues” that made him far from a perfect “role model.”

The MSM media experts are having the same problem: Still, very few Democrats are in complete denial about how bad this might be. If I were to combine several little lectures I heard on the networks over the last half hour, it would be something like this: When Watergate first started, I couldn’t believe how stupid it was. When I first heard about auditing small-time TEA PARTIERS, I thought the same thing. The president better not fall further into Nixon’s hole but come clean and take full responsibility right now. Blaming and firing this or that small-timer isn’t fooling anyone. Obama had a skilled and savvy team that got him reelected, maybe he needs a new team to get him to man up or “get out of the passive voice” and do what’s required to really govern. That includes taking real responsibility for the politicized bullying by his bureaucrats and admitting that he himself had gone way beyond the bounds of our constitutional system by creating the perception that it was somehow being “on the dark side” or outside the law to be his political opponent.

That’s the voice, more or less, of the people who really hope he can save himself. Well, I hope he can too.

Several comedians have used this line. Two words on why the president won’t be impeached: President Biden. And nobody really thinks it would be good for our first African American president to end up having to resign.

Pete’s irony below really should hit home. The power of the government had been turned against small-time community organizers, such as TEA PARTIERS, pro-lifers, and so forth. Nobody was going after Rove and his CROSSROADS. And, as we read in THE NEW REPUBLIC, nobody was going after the probably illegal evildoing of the giants on WALL STREET.

A problem with the IRS and our complicated and confusing tax code is that it makes it easy for very rich guys to weasel out of paying much at all. The government accountants and lawyers aren’t anywhere near the cognitive pay grade of the guns they can hire to find and defend their loopholes. The theory behind the TEA PARTY preference for the “fair tax” (a mistake on their part) or the “flat tax” is that the really rich will finally pay their fair share, or something like the percentage of their real income that I pay of mine.

So it shouldn’t be so hard to explain why the condescending “social welfare corporatism” of Obama’s government is waging war on the middle class. It wouldn’t be hard it our Republicans listened to Pete.

If we say it’s hard to be a saint in the city, that’s because it’s hard to be a saint anywhere. It’s true we live in radically untraditional times. But that’s both good and bad for authentically Christian life. As Walker Percy wrote, today Christians really have to think about who they are, and that’s because we live in a time where’s there’s little to no real guidance when it comes to “lifestyle choices.” It’s surely in some ways better to have to think than to live in a time a more traditional time when most people didn’t give the truth (or the “commitment”) of Christianity a second thought.

It’s easy for us to see that Christianity is, in some ways, quite the untraditional religion, depending as it does on wonderfully spectacular unprecedented events—such as creation, the Resurrection, the unique irreplaceability of each of our created personal lives, and the grace and the salvation given to particular persons.

We conservatives also see clearly, of course, that the truth about God is necessarily and beneficially embodied in the traditional, relational institution we call the church, and we see the idiocy (in the precise sense) and so the unsustainability of the “individualistic” Protestant view that it’s possible to know the personal, relational God all alone through one’s own conscience. But we also marvel at what’s genuinely, if quite incompletely, Christian in the Spirit-driven enthusiasm of America’s Pentecostals and many of our Evangelicals. The practice of the genuinely relational virtue of charity flourishes among many of our believers.

It is easy to see contradictions in the combination of bourgeois individualism, strong senses of place and fammily, and genuinely and often quite “otherworldy” Christian belief we can see in the South today. But even in the best cases, most good people in a free country are going to be living contradictions. It’s utopian in the bad or nonselective sense to romantically believe that people once–in the polis or the medieval village–led noncontradictory or perfectly integrated lives. Even good people, after all, were sinners then and sinners now.

Lives oriented by orthodox religion—by genuinely countercultural religion—may actually be becoming more common. Consider that the number of Jews in New York City is actually on the rise, thanks to the huge orthodox families. The observant Catholic Church in America has become smaller, but also more genuinely observant. Our prosperous, high-tech, online society makes homeschooling increasingly more easy. It also has facilitated working from home, and even, as Rod Dreher has shown us, moving home to work from home, without returning to the drudgery of living off the land. It’s possible, we’ve seen, to combine “organic” and high-tech features in genuinely “postmodern” forms of appropriately relational lives oriented around family, church, and meaningful work. Being a good father, for example, is getting harder for some but also easier for others. Family life is both dissolving and regenerating in somewhat unpredictable ways.

There’s still plenty of opportunity to live virtuous—even heroically virtuous–lives as free and prosperous men and women in a society such as ours. Everyone is challenged by the relational responsibilities of love and the invincible necessity of one’s own death. It’s tougher in some ways to live well—to find humanly worthy happiness—in our time, when so much human effort is directed toward thinking through the “how” (technology) and so little directed toward thinking about the “who” and the “why” (who we are and what we’re supposed to do). It’s tougher to live well when human institutions in which our relational places and so personal happiness are most readily found—such as the family—are more unstable than ever. But it’s easier than ever in others—due largely to the techno-successes of modern science and the effective justice of the modern science of government–and far from impossible overall.

2. The HR officer who called Sheldon in was a black woman skilled, as Leonard would say, in handlIng human relations issues. She’s likely the only smart black woman Sheldon has had contact with. The show, realistically enough (statistically speaking), does not feature any physicists who are black women. Sheldon stereotypes blacks as recent victims of slavery, and so he gives her ROOTS as as a gift. He has to learn why that’s inappropriate, why he should see each particular woman more personally and not as a member of a species or race.

3. That exposure to DIVERSITY does teach Sheldon something about being human, as does his exposure to real women in general. But it doesn’t make him a better physicist. And so we might say that affirmative action in physics or the STEM fields in general makes no sense. The true or legal diversity argument is all about its educational contribution–and not about equity or justice.

4. Sheldon, of course, learns more from the seemingly ordinary–but spirited or gutsy and good looking–white woman Penny. It probably shouldn’t be within the educational vision of elite universities to teach nerds how to relate to pretty girls who give it “the old community college try.” You might object to this line of analysis that Sheldon ain’t a student, but a researcher. But after all his life didn’t really change after getting that second PhD.

5. In general, arguments for DIVERSITY are about making students beter persons. They’re sometimes couched in vocational language, but that’s not what’s really meant. It’s what left of “the transformational ideal” of liberal education. But also part of that old idea is Sheldon’s view that the humanities so understood are relativistic drivel.

6. Minds should be transformed by awakening the longing for what’s really true, independently of “cultural perspective.” Right now we’re stuck with the alternative “worldviews” of the UNITY of physics theory and the DIVERSITY of the humanities.

7. It goes without saying that POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY–and 21st century THOMISM–aim at the science that overcomes that alleged clash of worldviews. The aim, as Walker Percy says, is to put back together what’s true about the existentialism at the foundation of making cultural diversity the bottom line with what’s true about Anglo-American empiricism (as found in analytic philosphy and the “consilence” aspiration of natural science).

Ken Masugi reminded me of the trouble Sheldon Cooper has had with his university’s human resources officer. But in Sheldon’s case that woman was schoolmarmish in the good sense. She patiently instructed Sheldon that he can’t simply speak his mind to women; he has to respect social conventions. She civilized him a bit. All the guys had HR issues. But when the time came to evaluate them for tenure, the HR officer considered only their actual scientific accomplishments. This is one piece of evidence among many that the show is too gentle and good natured to reflect actual academic life.

Or maybe there’s just a lot to be said for the scientists’ benign indifference to “speech issues,” at least usually. There’s no denying that Sheldon’s science is distorted a little by status and self-esteem issues, but he wouldn’t think of going to HR to get protected from the hurtful (and hilarious) venom of Leslie Winkle. An argument over the truth of string theory isn’t much like an argument over race, class, or gender–not to mention sex. It doesn’t occur to Sheldon or Leslie that words are merely rhetorical weapons to make a physics theory politically or academically dominant.