More ISI Facts

1. First off, let me thank Cindy Searcy for organizing a perfect week. Dr. Pat Deneen might say otherwise, given that his original room in the historic inn was a little too historic for him. (There are, it turns out, limits to the natural instinct for affection for one’s place.) It is true that the rooms featured the window air units first used by our Founding Fathers. But overall, the amenities we Bobos expect we’re reliably everywhere. Young men should be aware that Cindy is moving back to DC for a big job that actually pays, and she’s an available, brilliant, virtuous, and beautiful Catholic woman who could readily support a stay-at-home dad.

2. The theme of the conference was higher education. An issue that lurked beneath the surface and floated to the top now and again was: For sophisticated people these days, the free or autonomous persons is clearly the bottom line. But there’s one problem: We have no idea who we are—beyond being free and not dead—and what we’re supposed to do. Is higher education a credible way of addressing that issue?

3. Wendell Berry, of course, is big at ISI (we pomocons regard him as fairly naive in comparison to Walker Percy, but still . . . he does say some good stuff). According to Berry, we learn who we are and what we’re supposed to do in our particular place, as part of a living, localist way of life. Dr. Pat Deneen is so sure of that these days that his message to the students is that higher education, most of all, should be parochial—that it shouldn’t screw up our loyal, grateful devotion to a particular place. After our time at college, we should be taught, we should go home.

4. The students (one in particular) were all over the exaggeration of the semi-oxymoron—liberal, parochial education. They were right, to some extent: There was something too romantic or Dances-with-Wolves-y or Rousseau-y about Pat’s pushing the don’t disturb the natives theme. Truth—whether from classical philosophy or Biblical revelation—is universal and civilized, and we don’t do the hunter-gatherers any harm (we do them good) by teaching them agriculture or converting them to Christianity or having them read Shakespeare or Plato. Even if you do go home after discovering some of the truth at college, it’s not like you’ll ever be fully at home in the localist sense again. (Think here, if you want, about Atticus reading the classics in solitude while doing his stoic duty to his friends and fellow citizens in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or the poet William Alexander Percy taking admirable responsibility for his family home of Greenville, MS,while not being in Greenville [but in the South Seas and Europe] as much as possible.) But in Deneen’s partial defense, we can say that even great philosophers and poets don’t or shouldn’t become completely liberated from the joys and responsibilities of personal love, friendship, parenthood, citizenship, and so forth. And it’s only through the particular (that is, through the relational person) that we have access to the universal.

5. So Deneen was certainly right to focus his lecture on the liberationist exaggerations John Dewey and Allan Bloom share in common. More on that later.