A husband-and-wife team of American Enterprise Institute scholars, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, have a - I can't think of any other way to put it - sweet reflection today at AEI on what modern society has lost by making all its decisions by strategic calculation. It starts with this hypothetical vignette:
Imagine that you are an accomplished young woman, walking into a campus coffee shop toward the end of your senior year. Your eye catches a cute guy sitting across the room, talking to his friends. You smile inwardly, then get down to studying.
After a while, you get up for another coffee—and he gets in line behind you. He strikes up a conversation. Apparently you know some of the same people. You order, and move over to wait. You’re trying to check your texts, but your ear picks up his voice like a radio signal, louder and clearer than it should be. You wonder whether you should ask your friends about him.
“No!” screams your rational self. Why would you want to start a relationship—especially now, when you’re graduating and have your dream job lined up halfway across the country? You didn’t get where you are by letting a nice pair of eyes distract you. This is crazy.
They then dive into how Plato and Dante dealt with the experience of encountering beauty, and also recap the gist of the plot dynamic of Shakespeare's As You Like It:
Consider Shakespeare’s Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It. Rosalind divulges her love for Orlando within minutes of meeting him. Her cousin wonders whether she has lost her mind. But Rosalind is no twit—she is Shakespeare’s most astute heroine. While exiled to the Forest of Arden, she secures her own marriage, facilitates several others, and bests the melancholy philosopher Jacques in a battle of wits. When she first sees Orlando, she quickly perceives what her heart has longed for, finding signs of good character in the spare but decisive evidence of a few expressions and deeds. In Rosalind’s story, Shakespeare suggests that the capacity for love at first sight is the mark of a certain kind of intelligence: the intelligence of the eyes, which allows us to perceive the depth in the surface. Such intelligence can discern the truly beautiful, and respond to its sudden appearance with confidence.
At their first meeting, Rosalind sees that Orlando bears himself gently toward her but courageously toward an opponent in wrestling. Here might be a man who could both care for and protect a family. She discovers that Orlando has lost favor with the powerful, as she herself has, and she observes that he bears this misfortune with pluck. She learns the name of his father—a good man, whom her own father much admired. Perhaps the son will mature into such a man. Rosalind can make such conjectures because she has confidence in her eyes, which perceive the glimmer of reality through appearances. Like Plato, she believes that beauty is not a deceptive distraction from the real business of life, but the sign of the true, the mark of the good.
To respond with confidence to the beautiful does not mean blindly following gut feeling. Though Rosalind takes her first impression of Orlando seriously and treasures her vision of sharing his life, she also questions that vision. She tests Orlando playfully but relentlessly during their time in the forest, quizzing him on the strength of his love, probing his ability to keep promises, and holding him at a distance until she has seen further proof of his courage and mercy. Falling in love at first sight does not make Rosalind jump into bed with her beloved; it awakens an ardent desire to know whether he really is as good as he seems.
Rosalind could not have found Orlando by algorithm. The intelligence she employs to make this match is not the calculative reason of the brain, but the perceptive wisdom of the heart. Pascal famously wrote, “the heart has reasons which reason does not know.” The great mathematician was not denigrating what we can learn through geometric proofs. He was explaining how we can perceive truths that cannot be arrived at by deduction—facts about the world from which thinking should begin, rather than contestable propositions at which thinking might arrive. The heart, Pascal argues, has its own reasons.
They conclude by encouraging their hypothetical coffee-shop woman to linger a moment longer.
Writing for the Acton Institute's online periodical, James Diddems asks, "Is Social Science 'Science'?" It's basically a review of a new book by Pepperdine University professor Jason Blakely called We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics and Power. And now I have yet another addition to my ever-growing list of books I intend to read this year!
Katherine Boyle, at The Free Press, has an essay about purpose. She begins with a recollection:
The most memorable business pitch I ever attended began with a young man crying. His company was raising a modest amount of capital to build drones that could protect American troops in battle. The pitch was unremarkable in the first few minutes, until the founder mentioned his family and friends who had served in Iraq. He then stopped speaking, was quiet for a few seconds, and started to sob uncontrollably.
I was in grad school at the time and had been instructed by a female professor never to offer to make men coffee, because women don’t do that anymore. But when he exited the room to compose himself, the rest of us sat in silence for what must have been 30 seconds, until I spoke—to ask if anyone needed a fresh cup. When the founder returned, he did a forceful presentation of the business, even though he left without funding that day.
None of us ever discussed what happened—even immediately after the meeting—until I bumped into the founder almost a decade later, and he alluded to “the worst pitch he ever did.”
“No, no,” I responded. “It was the best.”
That company now employs several hundred people and is valued at a couple billion dollars. I was an intern on the sidelines that day, but unlike any meeting I’ve ever witnessed, I remember the details of that one. The chair I squirmed in. The time of day: one p.m. The patterned blouse I stared at when looking down as he sobbed. Because even though that day ended with a rejection email, it was clear that this entrepreneur didn’t care what anyone thought. He knew his calling. His purpose.
She substantiates our inkling that purpose is a rare commodity today:
Purpose is on the decline these days. A recent Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the constants that used to define our national character—have eroded in importance in the last 25 years. Only 38 percent of poll respondents said patriotism was very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998. Of religion, 39 percent said it was very important, down from 62 percent.
Beyond God and country, a desire to have children and community involvement plummeted by double digits, too. Meanwhile, the once universal value of “tolerance for others” has declined from 80 percent to 58 percent in the last four years alone. We’re replacing “Love thy neighbor” with “Get off my lawn.” The only “value” that has inflated in recent years is the one that can be easily measured: money.
Spoiler alert: Here's her conclusion:
For too long, we’ve been told we can be anything, do anything, and that all criticisms of that anything are an attack on our identity and very being. That self-love and self-care are all we need to thrive. And yet, we’ve never seemed more miserable, never been more lost, and never less confident in what we stand for.
Maybe one day the all-knowing AI will tell us the truth:
Find a purpose outside yourself. You are not enough.
Now, for this next one, refer to the pre-20th-century definition of liberalism, the one based on freedom and its institutional guarantors: "the rule of law, property, democratic politics, markets, and institutions of free inquiry and expression."
It's an essay by Matthew McManus at Liberal Currents entitled "Liberalism vs the Aristotelian Universe." Again, I'll cut to the chase:
Liberalism’s rejection of the meaning-saturated, hierarchical and authoritarian Aristotelian universe came at a significant price. By rejecting the idea of an orderly cosmos where each person knew their place, liberalism opened the door to a sense of loss and even nihilism which it has never been entirely able to banish. The continual resurgence of conservative and far right movements yearning for a return to something like the old paradigm—however stamped with features of the modern—reflects this dissatisfaction. But reactionaries like Patrick Deneen are wrong in supposing that liberalism’s triumph was simply the temporary triumph of one world view over an older and better one. Liberalism’s scientific vision of the world triumphed over the teleological Aristotelian universe because the latter simply ceased to be an intellectually viable framework. Indeed its foundations have been so decimated that even its most sophisticated defenders, like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, have had to largely junk its metaphysics in favor of a traditionalism which is very much of this world. Almost all the attempts to restore something like the Aristotelian universe in its original purity invariably end up making what are ultimately metaphysical claims about existence turn on moral or aesthetic assertions about the human need for meaning. Alternatively, they wind up engaging in speculative apologetics unlikely to convince any but the zealots.
Terry Powell at Penetrating the Darkness asks what finishing well - that is, coming to the end of one's earthly existence and being satisfied that one lived it at least in alignment with one's values-based aspiration - looks like to a Christian.
I'm excited to report some recent developments over at Precipice. First, there are a couple of new posts, one entitled "Post-Americans Behaving Badly," and another in which I ask
How do you remain solidly grounded as you maneuver through a world such as ours? There’s a good chance you’re a Christian. Is your personal salvation and the opportunity to do nice things for the fellow human beings you encounter in your daily life enough?
I also announce a huge milestone: some of my subscribers have switched to paid status without my even imploring them to do so.
Well, thought I, what kind of premium content can I reward them with? So I've launched a weekly podcast called "Exemplars of the Faith," which will, in each episode, look at a particular cool figure from the history of Christianity. I kick the series off with a look at William Cowper.
