Postmodern Conservatives v. Front Porch Republicans, cont'd

In a previous post I mentioned how I looked forward to watching FP Republicans duke it out with PoMo Cons in the future. Well, my wish was granted as Patrick Deneen responded to that post by calling for a showdown. Lawler and Deneen have gone back and forth on the issue and several others have joined in. I would recommend checking the PoMo Con blog for the past weekend or Russell Arben Fox's summary of it on Front Porch.

Personally, I would be interested to hear Patrick Deneen’s, or any Front Porcher’s, thoughts on the Declaration of Independence and how it fits into their vision, if it does at all. The reason why I ask is because I find Lawler’s reading of it compelling and it is one of the reasons why I am interested in hearing what else the PoMo Cons have to say.

As a realist, I believe objective moral norms exist, can be known, and should guide our actions. And I want to persuade my fellow citizens about this too. But such an idea is abstract and Americans dislike abstract philosophy. This idea has to be embodied in our tradition if they are to be taken seriously. Americans are naturally suspicious of Plato and Aquinas, but not of Jefferson and Lincoln. Lawler, who is keeping John Courtney Murray’s argument alive, introduces realism into the American Political Tradition by linking it to the Declaration. The idea rejected by Locke has become the cornerstone.

Now Deneen has critiqued Lawler’s interpretation and it is forceful. But right now I would like to hear how he or any of the other Front Porchers will address this concern. It appears the figures and ideas they champion are either on the margins of the American Political Tradition or represent only a part of it, the South. They are very interested in fostering memory, but it tends to be the memories of a select region of the country.

Here is a possible out for them. Russell Kirk, who would be on their side on this debate, wrote a book titled The Roots of the American Order which addresses this very concern. Kirk borrows from Voegelin the idea of existential representation: every society attempts to reflect the order its members believe is underlying the cosmos as a whole. America, the city upon a hill, is just one example of this. The book then traces the historical ‘roots’ (Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and London) of America’s search for order. Interestingly, Kirk leaves the Declaration and Lincoln out of his account.

It is strange that I have not seen more posts on Kirk on FPR since there seems, to me at least, to be an obvious affinity. Maybe I’ll make that my next wish…

Let the experts handle this, sir.

Last week President Obama dissolved the Bioethics Council commissioned by President Bush. This is just another step in a series to put “restore science to its proper place.” The previous step was to federally fund embryonic stem cell research, something his predecessor had forbidden.

Ivan Kenneally, in an article in The New Atlantis, has worked out the presuppositions of the current President on these matters. Obama is, what Keneally calls, a technocratic populist. I’ll explain these terms in reverse order. He is a populist because he believes special interests, in this case the Christian Right, has highjacked the issue of stem cell research. This is why the Bioethics Council had to be dissolved. In the eyes of many, the council was simply a cabal of Catholic conspirators who were trying impose their extreme views on the rest of the country. (Peter Lawler, who was on the Council, has pointed out there was no such conspiracy because not everyone was Catholic and the group came to no consensus on any of the issues they discussed.) Obama’s removal of this ‘faction’ for the sake of the common good makes him a populist.

Why is he technocrat? More importantly, what is a technocrat? They are a group of “hyper-educated elites with specialized politico-scientific expertise [who] are singled out to manage the benighted rest of us.” Now, how can this be since we just learned the President favors the many over the few. This is the tension within Obama’s thought, a tension which Kenneally says goes back to the Enlightenment itself. For Enlightenment thinkers wanted to achieve two goals: equality and base politics on the model of the natural sciences. The belief in the latter is because of the success of the natural sciences in the modern era. If politics could be made more scientific, it was believed, then we could achieve prosperity and perpetual peace.

While the theory began in the Enlightenment, it only became actualized in American Politics in the 20th century. It begins with Woodrow Wilson and his essay, “The Study of Administration” and continued with subsequent Presidents. Patrick Deneen has a quote from JFK discussing the shift:

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -
Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the
matter is that most of the problems … that we now face are technical problems,
are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not
lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred the
country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond
the comprehension of most men….

All the themes of the technocrat are on display here: “political viewpoints” are irrelevant because today’s problems are “technical” and require “administrative” solutions. These problems are “beyond the comprehension of most men.” Here is the tension with populism. The 20th century is the century of the common man AND the century of enlightened administration. Modern Liberals, like Plato, believe in monarchy-the only difference is his field.

Now we can understand what President Obama means by putting “restore science to its proper place.” It means letting the scientists make the call when it comes to questions like stem cell research and cloning. David Brooks has pointed out that this Obama’s strategy when it comes to health care also:

Which is why you have MedPAC. That’s the Medicare Payment Advisory
Commission that you want to turn into a health care Federal Reserve Board — an
aloof technocratic body of experts that will make tough decisions beyond the
reach of politics. You can take every thorny issue, throw it to MedPac and
consider it solved.

Notice the decision will be made “beyond the reach of politics.” The problem raised by living constitutionalism, judicial activism, occurs here too. A small, elite group of unelected officials will decide our most important issues for us. But the perennial question which has dogged Plato’s philosopher-king, rears its head: Who guards the guardians?

Reading Twitter in Tehran

Joshua Kucera contends the protests over the current election results in Iran might be overblown b/c the tweeters there are creating an impression that there are more Reformers than actually exist. The implication of his post is Twitter is harmful because people are out on the streets protesting and getting beat up on the basis of an illusion that others will arrive to back them up.

Thomas L. Friedman has argued that it is hard to know how many protestors are out there because of the chiling effect of bang bang versus tweet tweet. He also points out that if the election was valid, then why does Ahmadinejad not allow the Europeans to confirm the results? It would only reinforce his position.

However, I've read elsewhere that it is important to remember the people who tweet, blog, and facebook tend to be college students who are only one slice of the Iranian Pie. They are not representative of the whole population.

In the end though, Friedman points out a benefit which might cancel the possible harm which Kucera warns us about. He argues that Facebook and Twitter offer a Virtual Mosque for the Reformers because they are places for refuge in much of the same way mosques offered havens for religious believers in the past. It is there, a place set apart from the state, in which grievances can be aired, minds can be persuaded, and strategies can be devised.

Kesler's three waves of liberalism

Charles Kesler, editor of Claremont Review of Books, was interviewed by Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge. He argues there are three waves of liberalism: political, economic, and cultural.

Political Liberalism, championed by Woodrow Wilson, seeks to supplant the Founders' Constitution with a living one. The belief is institutional devices such as federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances impedes government activity. This might have been necessary in a previous age, Wilson and Progressives contend, but it is harmful in a complex, modern society.

Economic Liberalism emerged during the New Deal era. FDR believed the natural rights the Founders described in the Declaration of Independence were meaningless unless the government actively provided materials to exercise those rights. What use is my rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness if I don't have a job? This is the rationale for public unemployment insurance and social security.

The final stage is cultural liberalism which came to fruition during the Sexual Revolution of the 1960's. Like the earlier stages, a rejection of the Founders' views sets up the new framework. The repudiated claim is found again in the Declaration of Independence which says there is a "law of nature and nature's God." Since we no longer defined by that, the logic goes, we are now free to define ourselves. We are no longer "one nation under God" but a collection of individuals who "express ourselves."

Kesler's presentation of classical (the Founders) versus modern liberalism seems spot on. What is not brought up in the interview is that Kesler's framework is borrowed from the political philosopher Leo Strauss who taught at Claremont. The difference between the two is Kesler's three waves are within the last stage of American liberalism while Strauss saw the three waves in terms of liberalism or modern thought per se. Let me put it another way: Kesler sees the dividing line as between the Founders and Progressives while Strauss argued the line is actually further back, between the Ancients and the Moderns. For Strauss, John Adams and Ted Kennedy would be on the same side of the line. Kesler, like other thinkers from Claremont, have incorporated and revised the ideas of their late great mentor in a subtle but provocative way. Patrick Deneen discusses this revision in greater detail; the difference is he is not as sanguine about it as I am.

Hold the Soma, please

The Enlightenment project is based on the idea "conquer nature to relieve man's estate." Unleashing technology will allow man to control nature and live a comfortable, effortless existence. Modern thinkers like Descartes and Francis Bacon believed man would become happier as technological improvements gained steam.

But Peter Lawler, in a recent post on postmodern conservative, reminds his readers there is a venerable line of thinkers, from Rousseau to Patrick Deneen, who would deny the Enlightenment contention. They believe "the emancipation of technology from moral and political control would lead to the dehumanization of man." In other words, we might be unhappier than our classical and medieval ancestors.

The POMO Con response to this debate is to make a distinction between the different kinds of technology. The modern view is man should use his creative powers to harness nature for the betterment of mankind e.g. dams and dishwashers; POMO Cons are on board with that.

But they would oppose the following: contemporary thinkers like Francis Fukayama have taken Descartes' idea of "conquering nature" and extended it to human nature. Thinkers like Fukayama want to redesign human nature a la Brave New World. Cloning, mood management pills, and other devises are seen as mechanisms to make us free and happy. Freedom and happiness, they say, will require us to cease to be human. This has been termed transhumanism.
Front Porch Republicans could respond to all this by pointing that biotechnology is the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment understanding of technology and nature.

Lawler's rejoinder to FP Republicans and Transhumanists would look something like this: human nature is unique from the rest of nature. We are 'Aliens' because we are not at home in this world. We have a yearning, which makes us miserable, but also makes us distinctive; dolphins do not suffer angst. And it is this distinctiveness, this uniqueness, which would be destroyed by the biotechnology revolution. Grace might not destroy our nature, but Soma sure will.

Millennials work weekends

The Millennials, aka Generation Y, is entering the workforce and being asked to work long hours if they want to move up in the world. One take on this is the Millennials are "Trophy Kids" who have been spoiled by their Baby Boomer parents and are now whining because they have entered the real world.

However, there is another possibility-maybe employers ARE asking Millennials to work too much. Maybe they're asking their employees to work more than any previous generation has had to before. While I don't have the numbers to back this up, I am sure we'll find 'hours per week' are on an incline.

At this point, I'm sure many people, especially Americans, will want to know why workaholism is a problem. "Didn't the Founders place industry on the list of virtues?" they'd ask. Yes, but virtue is the golden mean between two extremes and what we have today is no media via.

Coincidentally, the vice of workaholism breeds its counterpart, idleness:

When your mind and body are exhausted from overwork, what leisure time
there is tends to be squandered on passive entertainments: hours spent in
front of the television or sleeping weekends away. In this way the person
becomes impoverished on many levels: personal, familial and social.

This is the type of criticism Americans receive from their European counterparts: Work is for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. On this point, they're right; however, what many contemporary Europeans consider leisure is simply hedonism. What contemporary Americans and Europeans share in common is materialism, albeit of different varieties.

What do I mean by 'leisure' then? Check out Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Or if you want something shorter...

We are talking here about recreation, about doing things that that are
valuable for their own sake such as reflecting on the meaning of life, attending
cultural events or learning a new language.

In conversations I've had with family and friends what I often hear is that if you don't play the game then you'll either be permanently benched or relegated to second string. They say nothing can be done about this.

France's solution is to fix the number of hours per week by law, but I admit I don't want that for fear of corporate flight. But maybe my family and friends can change the culture once they're in control of things. What seems to be happening now is each generation asks more of the next generation. One day the Millennials will be the bosses and they will have to decide if they want to ask the up and comers if they can come into work on Saturday. My advise to them is they don't ask.

Robert George debates Doug Kmiec

C-SPAN televised the debate between Princeton's Robert George and Obamacon Doug Kmiec on whether Pro-Lifers can support President Obama.

Kmiec, who thinks the answer is yes, debated Hadley Aarkes on this same question which I discuss here.

Postmodern Conservatives v. Front Porch Republicans

"PoMo Con" appears to be an oxymoron at first. Postmoderns reject the intelligibility of the universe in favor of the social construction of reality, while conservatives believe it is the other way around. The paradoxical title is probably an attempt to startle readers and encourage them to take a second look at this group. Here is an excerpt from the introductory post of a blog being run by the group:

It is a phrase that is inspired by Peter Lawler's efforts to recommend a
"postmodernism rightly understood" - a period that may or might arrive after the
passing of the modern order. Thus, it is not to be confused with the
trendy (or, really, tired) postmodernism of modern academia inspired by such
thinkers as Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. It is instead a rejection of
modernity in the name of the insights of premodernity - Thomistic and
Aristotelian "realism" in particular. That said, it is a postmodernity
that also wishes to retain a good number of the boons of modernity - Starbucks,
McDonalds, suburbs and exurbs, the interstate highway system, orthodontic
dentistry, etc....) - while rejecting its excessive materialism, individualism,
liberalism, atheism, etc.

By this definition, it makes sense PoMo Cons would find a home at First Things, a journal in which the Editors want to embrace democratic capitalism while rejecting its Enlightenment presuppositions.

That being said, I would call attention to another school of thought, also grounded in Tocqueville and connected to ISI, which has a blog titled Front-Porch Republic. The title is a reference to the absence of front porches in many neighborhoods today. Patrick Deneen, whose blog is posted on my daily news websites, is part of this group. They reject modernity outright and want a return to localism, agrarianism, and tradition. They would argue that Starbucks, McDonalds, and the interstate highway system is either bad or cannot be obtained without the corresponding modern values of materialism, individualism, and atheism.

It will be a treat to watch these two groups debate these issues over the coming months. For what its worth, as a ROFTER I lean towards to the first group.