The paradigm change in public education

School choice and meaningful educational reform are gaining steam, as James Pinkerton points out in this well-worth reading article posted at The American Conservative:  School Choice: The Paradigm Shift.  Building off the work of philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, Pinkerton does a good job explaining the forces behind the growing acceptance of school choice, namely the increase in personal autonomy made possible by the technological revolution of the last 30 years.  Conservatives can often fall into the trap of bemoaning the changes in the world (and there is a lot to bemoan), but when it comes to reforming the educational system, real progress is being made, and that progress is due in no small part to the advances in technology that we have seen since the 1980's.

Back to the future!

The proper role of the laity in determining policy according to Catholic social teaching

GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's bishop sets out the teaching on that topic quite well in this short post over at the Diocese of Madison Catholic Herald:  Subsidiarity, solidarity, and the lay mission.   As the good bishop explains, the application of many principles of Catholic social teaching rests with the laity, and there may be legitimate prudential differences in how lay people think social policy should be ordered to attain the goals proper to human flourishing.  But on certain key issues, there can be no legitimate prudential disagreement on the need of the state to protect human life, to defend religious liberty, to defend the traditional definition of marriage, and to protect private property.  As the bishop writes,

Violations of the above involve intrinsic evil — that is, an evil which cannot be justified by any circumstances whatsoever. These evils are examples of direct pollution of the ecology of human nature and can be discerned as such by human reason alone. Thus, all people of good will who wish to follow human reason should deplore any and all violations in the above areas, without exception. The violations would be: abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, government-coerced secularism, and socialism.

Something to remember the next time somebody claims that Paul Ryan's political views fall outside the permissible range of those that can be held by a Catholic in good standing.

The contribution of Charles Carroll to religious liberty

That topic is discussed over at The Imaginative Conservative in this post:  A Warm Friend of Toleration:  Charles Carroll of Carrollton, American Independence, and Religious Freedom.  It is a rich and readable overview of this remarkable founding father and the religious, familial and economic forces that helped propel him into the Patriot cause during the American Revolution.  Carroll is one of the great Catholics of American history and his story should be much more widely known.  From persecution to prominence to patriotism -- it is quite a tale!

Garry Wills on the role of government in conservative thought

The American Conservative has posted an essay written in 1964 by now-liberal but then-conservative Garry Wills discussing the role of government in conservative thought:  The Convenient State.  Just in the midst of the Goldwater movement in the GOP, Wills wrote a cogent and classically informed take on the necessity and limits of the state in conservative thought.  Far from being utopian or ideological, conservatism as Wills explains builds upon the fundamental conviction within western civilization that there is a zone of individual liberty upon which the state may not intrude, a part of man that is his and his alone.  Libertarianism expands this zone beyond its prudential limits, while totalitarianism denies its existence altogether.  In the western world, conservatism has thus seen the role of the state as limited, as a vindicator of justice that respects the individuality of the human person.  In this, it seeks (as conservatism always does) to preserve balance.

Where the libertarian eschews justice in favor of a maximization of private privilege and restraint from limitation, and totalitarian absorbs the individual into a vision of the true, the good and the beautiful that is uniform and coerced, conservatism embraces the contingent nature of justice in human societies marked by diversity and variety.  In its quest, conservatism avoids the sterile and dogmatic seduction of rationalism; not for the conservative is the quixotic attempt to remake society on the basis of abstraction. As Wills puts it:

Each society must form a unique constitution, an “agreed station” of components, growing out of the resources it can command. The ideal state–of a justice or a freedom defined outside any particular human context–is as meaningless as some uniform ideal of individual fulfillment. Is monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy the best form of government? Such a question simply breeds further questions: Best for what society? And what kind of monarchy or democracy? These questions are as hopeless as similar ones would be in the case of an ideal life for individuals. Is it better that man be an artist or philosopher, monk or martyr, doctor or teacher, worker or statesman? And if he is a doctor, should he engage in research, psychology, or compassionate work among the poor? If an artist, should he write or paint in an austere or demonstrative style? To attempt an abstract answer to these questions is to deny the mystery of individuality, the secret springs of motive, that make up the human fact of freedom. As ever, rationalism leads to sterile paradox, to an ideal freedom that is a denial of freedom.

Read it all.  And in this the silly season of politics, read it repeatedly!

Were the Catholic bishops wrong about Paul Ryan's budget plan?

Yes, says this post over at the Creative Minority Report:  The Bishops Were Wrong on the Ryan Budget.  Now that Ryan is Mitt Romney's running mate, the bishops' critique of his budget proposals is likely to get a lot more press.  It is always good to remember that while the bishops have a charism to teach faith & morals, they are not infallible on economic policy matters.  Their judgment when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the economy is subject to criticism just as much as anybody else's.

Related item:  Ross Douthat has a great post on why Romney picked Ryan as his VP choice.  Douthat identifies a key weakness of the team when it comes to appealing to economically strapped middle class  voter:

[It] is the (understandable) fear among hard-strapped voters that Republican policies will benefit the rich more than the middle class. Ryan’s association with entitlement reform is at best orthogonal to that weakness, and at worst it exacerbates it substantially. 

That's spot-on, I think.  The Romney-Ryan ticket has to make a convincing argument to the middle of the country that their economic proposals will be better for the middle class than the current trajectory of the country under Obama administration.

The purpose of torture, Soviet-style

That's the topic of this post by Neo-Neocon:  The Goals of Soviet Torture. The whole post is worth reading, but I found this quote from Martin Amis regarding why Stalin embraced torture particularly insightful: "He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction." As George Orwell reminds us time and time again, at the core of totalitarianism of any stripe is the drive to force people not just to tolerate lies and error, but to affirm them as truth.

Can the humanities be saved?

This post has some good suggestions about the path forward to rescue the humanities from their current stagnation, but the author unfortunately doesn't zero in on the main problem with the humanities as a university discipline today. The reason why there is so little insight and original research in the humanities now is that most humanities scholars have abandoned the quest for truth and virtue in the object of their study and have bought into a host of politicized ideologies which they then project onto the great literature and events of the past. This is the core corruption at the heart of the crisis of the humanities in the West. Until it is addressed, the study of the humanities on the whole will constitute a wasteland.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Was the American Revolution a real revolution?

The American Conservative raises that question by re-publishing this essay by the late Robert Nisbet, a sociologist and one of the leading conservative thinkers of the post World-War II period: Was There An American Revolution? Nisbet covers a lot of ground in this essay, touching on everything from class & property to religious liberty.  Nisbet's conclusion, contra other conservatives like Russell Kirk and M.E. Bradford, is that the American Revolution was indeed a real revolution, impacting social, cultural and religious aspects of American life, leading to a profound change not only in the formal political institutions of the country but also the underlying spirit of the nation.  As Nisbet concludes:

I would argue, then, that there was indeed an American Revolution in the full sense of the word–a social, moral, and institutional revolution that effected major changes in the character of American society–as well as a war of liberation from England that was political in nature. 

The line from the social revolution of the 1770s to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s is a direct one. It is a line that passes through the Civil War–itself certainly not without revolutionary implication–and through a host of changes in the status of Americans of all races, beliefs, and classes. The United States has indeed undergone a process of almost permanent revolution. I can think of no greater injustice to ourselves, as well as to the makers of revolution in Philadelphia, than to deny that fact and to allow the honored word revolution to be preempted today by spokesmen for societies which, through their congealed despotisms, have made real revolution all but impossible.

The linkage between the revolutionary work of the American founding generation and the civil rights movement of the 1960s is one that was made repeatedly by many in the civil rights movement at the time, perhaps most notably by Martin Luther King, Jr. in The Letter From a Birmingham City Jail.

There and back again (with apologies to JRR Tolkien)

We drove to Ellensburg, Washington and back to Spokane on Sunday. What a nightmare. The normally tranquil highway across eastern Washington State was crowded with a lot of erratic driving, big trucks weaving throw traffic, etc. There was a very bad motorcycle accident on the bridge across the Columbia River at Vantage, and farther on down the road a red sports car was driving against traffic on one lane of the highway - where was the state patrol????? Oh, and we got a flat tire too! Glad to be home, hiding in my basement, safe from the crazy drivers out on the highway. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The unexpected surprise of basil ice cream

That's what I experienced at lunch today.  For a treat my wife and I went to Sante in downtown Spokane.  Sante is a French-inspired restaurant that makes everything from bread to cured meats to desserts strictly in-house.  They locally source a lot of their meat and cheese products, and are one of the few places here in Spokane where one can find a properly cooked rabbit.

Anyway, after lunch today we ordered dessert, and what should come with our almond cake but a scoop of house-made ice cream.  Not just any ice cream, mind you, but basil ice cream.  I'm a fan of basil, but I had yet to experience it as a flavoring in ice cream before.  Wow!  I am now officially a convert to the church of basil ice cream.  The taste was verdant and fresh while not overpowering the sweetness of the ice cream.  In fact, the basil flavor was a perfect companion to the texture and sweetness of the house-made ice cream.  And it went very, very well with the almond cake that was theoretically the star of the dessert.  Well, I've had almond cake before so the cake (while excellent, with a dense and buttery crumb) was not nearly the revelation that the ice cream was.  Here's a picture -- and the photo does not do justice to just how good this dessert was.

That was a week's worth of dessert points with one plate, but it was so very worth eating.  I will happily forgo dessert until next weekend, content with the memory of that fantastic basil ice cream.

Related item:  Br. Charles over at A Minor Friar has a post on another ice cream related surprise, this one occurring at lunch with his religious community in Italy. Congratulations on the anniversary, Br. Charles. And I hope your ice cream was half as good as the ice cream we enjoyed this afternoon.

Reading Robert Frost

I'm generally not a poetry reader.  I like Shakespeare's plays but I don't care much for his sonnets, for example.  I much prefer Emerson's prose to his poetry, and the same goes for most other American writers who create in both forms.  But I do like Robert Frost's poetry, largely because of the accessibility of his work.  The American Conservative has posted How to Read Robert Frost by Micah Mattix, which in turn is a nice little review of Tim Kendall's book The Art of Robert Frost.  Mattix does a very good job of summarizing just why Frost is such a compelling poet.  Well worth a read.

Book review: Roads to Modernity by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Here at Libertas et Memoria I like to explore the roots of the American experiment in ordered liberty. Most of the time, my explorations focus on the religious roots of our nation. But when the United States was created as an independent republic, religion was not the sole intellectual force shaping the views of many of the most active Patriots who sought freedom from the British crown. In addition to the various forms of Christianity (including theistic rationalism) that percolated through American life during the Revolutionary and early Republic periods, Enlightenment philosophy also played a large part in shaping public discourse and debate surrounding both American independence and the shape of our republican (with a small-r) institutions once independence was won.

Just as there were multiple Christianities in play at the time of the American founding, so too within the Western world there were multiple Enlightenments, each different in scope and purpose. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has detailed the diversity within the Enlightenment project in her book The Roads to Modernity; The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Knopf: 2005, $25.00 hardback). In this book she presents a study of the similarities and the critical differences between the various national manifestations of Enlightenment philosophy. Far from being a unified movement with a set of consistent ideological points, the Enlightenment was a varied and in many instances contradictory movement that took starkly different forms in the Anglo-American and European continental worlds. Himmelfarb's book is a very clear and cogently written account of just how and why these two schools of Enlightenment thought went off on radically different tangents.

Himmelfarb structures her book around the basic thesis that each of the Enlightenments manifested a drive towards a different aspect of rationalist thinking about the nature of society and the role of government in ensuring the common good. The British Enlightenment, in her view, was based on the very pressing need for social reform within the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French Enlightenment emphasized the role of reason as an abstract and ideological concept, leveling institutions within France and in the broader European world in a revolt against tradition, custom and prescription. The American Enlightenment took place within the context of a culture that sought to foster and expand traditional liberties through a politics that was at once both moralist and realist in its understanding of human flourishing. It is the diversity behind each Enlightenment that explains the diversity in paths that each society took into the modern world.

Himmelfarb gives pride of place and treatment to the British Enlightenment, a not surprising approach given that her primary field as a historian is British intellectual history. As she notes in her prologue, she sees the British Enlightenment as setting the stage for the French and American Enlightenments, both of which built on the accomplishments of British thinkers. The key distinctive component of the British Enlightenment, as she explains, is the idea of virtue. Rather than abstract reason, the British Enlightenment focused on instilling virtue, and not just personal virtue but first and foremost social virtue. Reason for the British had an instrumental role, as Himmelfarb explains, serving the propagation of virtue within the population. Once this point is understood, the full panoply of the British Enlightenment can be seen -- and movements and persons often seen as outside of the Enlightenment tradition (such as religious reformer John Wesley & the early Methodists, or Whig statesman and grandfather of modern conservatism Edmund Burke) come into focus as pivotal players in the British Enlightenment project.

Himmelfarb explores the role of reformist religion in the British Enlightenment in great detail, noting how both traditional religion in Britain and new movements like the Methodists both worked to try to reinforce the virtues of compassion and fellow-feeling, of charity and sentiment. This emphasis on the key role of social virtue in the British Enlightenment was not limited to churchmen -- David Hume and Adam Smith both believed in a sentimental moral sense that united all human beings, a moral sense that was not necessarily irrational but which was independent of reason as well. Himmelfarb goes into great detail explaining how the emphasis on moral sense and virtue played out in the works of Burke and other reformers within the British system. For anyone interested in understanding the vital role that religion played in 18th century British society, her chapter on Methodism is alone worth the price of the book.

The portions of the book that discuss the French and American Enlightenments are considerably shorter and lack the punch and vitality of the larger section of the book dealing with the British Enlightenment. This is unfortunate, because Himmelfarb's analysis of the French Enlightenment tends to follow a more conventional narrative than her truly enlightening (pun intended) discussion of the British Enlightenment. Unlike the British, who viewed moral sentiment and social virtue as forces independent of reason, the French fell into the trap of assigning to abstract reason the blade-edge of an ideology of revolution and violence. Chop, chop fell traditional institutions, moral intuitions and ultimately human heads.

Himmelfarb's discussion of the American Enlightenment focuses on its distinctive quality: a focus on political liberty that built off of, rather than opposed, the religious values and institutions of colonial and early republican America. As she observes, "[t]he abiding strength and influence of religion was such that even those who were not themselves believers respected not only the religious beliefs of others but the idea of religion itself." While the Americans worked to prevent a national established church after independence, the government was supportive of voluntary religious expression and action. Church and state might be separate, but such separation "did not signify the separation of church and society." In fact, as Himmelfarb observes, religion was strengthened within society because it did not have to rely on direct and overt government support. Throughout American colonial and early republican history, religion was linked to freedom, and as such thrived in the environment of the American Enlightenment, with its emphasis on ordered liberty. Far from being an enemy of Enlightenment values like science and reason, religion in America was webbed through with the Enlightenment, from Cotton Mather through the advent of American learned societies under John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

The picture of the Enlightenment in America is far from perfect, as Himmelfarb takes pains to point out. While religion and the Enlightenment were closely connected, there was little embrace within America as a whole for people on the margins of society, notably the poor, Indians and African-Americans. The poor were often seen as purposefully indolent, lazy louts in a nation were land was for the taking on the frontier just beyond the boundaries of the settlements furthest west. Indians, as Himmelfarb details, were thought little better than savages, fit only to be educated for assimilation. Founders like John Jay raised their voices against the treatment of native Americans by settlers, warning that the whites were on their way to a far deeper savagery than that found in the native American communities. Such warnings largely went unheeded.

As with the Indians, America also wrestled with the problem of its enslaved African-American population. As with the Indians, both economic and social interests mixed with racism to complicate the relationship between the dominant population and the marginalized slaves. White supremacy polluted efforts to move towards emancipation, and concerns about the economic ramifications of emancipation kept many abolitionists quiet. When the Quakers brought forth a petition calling on Congress to move towards the abolition of slavery, the only major Founder to publicly support the effort was an aging and ailing Benjamin Franklin. Even as ardent an abolitionist as Alexander Hamilton did not move forward because of concerns about how such a proposal would impact the finances of the young American Republic. James Madison refused to support it because he was, as Himmelfarb delicately puts it, "ambivalent about slavery itself."

Most surprising of all when it comes to slavery is Jefferson -- the man who next to Franklin often is seen as the paragon of the American Enlightenment. Jefferson, the man who wrote so eloquently about the natural rights of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was steadfastly opposed to any plan for immediate emancipation, favoring instead a plan for the ethnic cleansing of American-Americans from the United States. Jefferson called for colonies of freed slaves to be established far from the United States, because the two races, white and black, could never in Jefferson's view be able to co-exist with each other in social peace. Madison was such an enthusiast for this plan that he called not only for this plan to be applied to slaves of African ancestry, but all blacks in the United States. Even freemen were to be expelled from the land of their birth. Himmelfarb provides a brief discussion regarding how this contradiction in the American Enlightenment, of freedom for some but not all, would only be resolved through Lincoln's work during the Civil War.

Himmelfarb's book is an insightful and detailed look at the three Enlightenments that took place within western civilization in the 18th and early 19th centuries. As she notes in her epilogue to the book, the British, French and American Enlightenments are still with us -- that much of our political, legal and social cultures are still shaped by the fundamental values and priorities and weaknesses of each of the different Enlightenments. While other ideas are present in our public lives, modernity itself was brought about by the three Enlightenments and their effects. As she writes at the very end of her book, "We are, in fact, still floundering in the verities and fallacies, the assumptions and convictions, about human nature, society, and the polity that exercised the British moral philosophers, the French philosophes, and the American Founders." Indeed we are. Indeed we are.

"Founders Famous and Forgotten"

That's the title of this post by Daniel L. Driesbach, posted over at The Imaginative Conservative. Driesbach provides an insightful overview of why we think some founders are important, why others fall by the wayside of popular imagination, and why some of the less-known founders are still critically important for understanding our constitutional and political order.  Driesbach concludes his essay with this word of warning -- something anyone interested in the American Founding should keep constantly before his or her eyes:

The near exclusive focus on a select few virtually deified famous founders impoverishes our understanding of the American founding. It also departs from the canons of good scholarship. The demands of honest scholarship require scholars to give attention to the thoughts, words, and deeds of not only a few selected demigods but also an expansive company of men and women who contributed to the founding of the American republic.

Our nation was not built only by those we consider, in light of our own prejudices and perspectives, "great men."  To understand our nation, we need to broaden the scope of the people we consider worthy of study.

Thursday night culture moment: Overture to Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks by the Malaysian Philarmonic Orchestra

A performance of one of my favorite pieces of classical music.



Last Sunday here in Spokane my wife and I went and listened to a performance of the Music for the Royal Fireworks at a concert in Riverfront Park in Spokane.  The concert is held every year at the end of July and is sponsored by the Allegro Baroque and Beyond organization in our fair city. It is a delightful event, topped off by the Baroque Band playing the Music for the Royal Fireworks cued to a professional fireworks display.  It is a larger display than the city provides for the 4th of July!  This year's performance was particularly lovely, as the moon was out for show on a clear night, framed against the flowing river, and the music danced upon the waters.

Should America join the British Commonwealth?

A Conservative Blog for Peace weighs the pros and cons here:  Anglosphere.  For the record, I come down solidly on the "con" side of this debate.  I think it would be a fundamental mistake for the United States to join the Commonwealth.  While our culture, law and politics is shaped by our historical association with Britain, we are also a distinctive society and polity with a strong republican (with a small-r) instinct. Do we have a special relationship with Britain? Yes. Should that relationship compel us to enter the Commonwealth? No.

On a more personal note, my ancestors did not renounce foreign kings only only to see their American descendants swear allegiance to the House of Windsor.

That said, I would be more than happy to see our current, unsingable national anthem replaced with a song that emphasizes our historic link to Great Britain, namely, "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (which is sung to the same tune as "God Save the King/Queen."

"What Would Burke Do?"

That's the title of this post by Daniel McCarthy over at The American Conservative. As McCarthy writes, Burke's high church sensibility was reflected in his political views. A champion of ordered liberty, Burke sought to protect the legitimate aspirations of dissenters to freedom within the British Empire while at the same time crafting a politics of prudence that would increase the stability of the British Empire by fostering justice and limited government. McCarthy does a fantastic job of comparing the high church conservatism of men like Burke and Kirk with the low church and no church varieties that dominate much of the discourse within the conservative movement in America. Well worth a read.

Critiques of two posts on Jeffersonian conservatism

• The first post is written by Paul Crimley Kuntz and published at The Imaginative Conservative:  Of Rights and Duties: A Jeffersonian Dialogue.  Kuntz provides a detailed reflection on the necessary link between rights and duties in normative conceptions of ordered liberty. Kuntz then seeks to connect that linkage of rights and duties with Jefferson's theories of government as expressed during his public career during the Revolution, his service in Washington's cabinet, and his own terms of office as president of the United States. The weakness of Kuntz's presentation is that he never addresses the radical hostility that Jefferson had towards the traditional pillars of duty in society, most notable religion.  Jefferson had a loathing for any form of organized religion and had a particularly vile hatred for Catholicism. His fervid embrace of the French Revolution and his dreams for perpetual revolution also cast serious doubts on any effort to deduce a functional theory of rights from Jefferson's politics. Finally, one cannot overlook the fact that virtually all of Jefferson's public work on rights and duties was in large part an effort to defend the slaveocracy of which he was an enthusiastic patriarch. Jefferson is simply too compromised a thinker to serve as a satisfactory model for conservatives to follow when conceiving of rights and duties. 
• The second post is from the always interesting blog Pittsford Perennialist and is a short review of a new book of conservative thought by Southern historians Clyde Wilson and Brion McClanahan.  Wilson and McClanahan try to create a conservative intellectual history that emphasizes the libertarian roots of a largely Southern form of conservatism that traces much of its substance to Jeffersonian ideology. Of course, their embrace of ideology immediately disqualifies them from being conservatives in the classic sense of that term that understood by men like Burke and Kirk, Taft and Buchanan.  Wilson and McClanahan attempt to recruit Russell Kirk to defend their Jeffersonian conservative project via Kirk's early misgivings about Alexander Hamilton.  This is, unfortunately, a less than comprehensive portrayal of Kirk's views of Hamilton.  As I commented over at the Pittsford Perennialist:
  

The characterization of Kirk's views of Hamilton are incomplete. While at the beginning of his career Kirk was skeptical of Hamilton's conservative credentials, at the end of his life Kirk had come around to understanding that it was Hamilton who represented conservatism and it was Jefferson who was a radical. Kirk described himself from the 1960's on as a "disciple of the Federalists," and he included writings by Hamilton in his Portable Conservative Reader. How many writings by Jefferson did Kirk include? Precisely this many: zero.

Kirk's last major work, Rights and Duties, includes a robust defense of the Hamiltonian approach to the US Constitution. Kirk rejected the Jeffersonian approach to constitutional construction and wrote a full-throated defense not only of Hamilton's legal theory but also Hamilton's political & economic program. Kirk also did much to argue that the characterization of Hamilton's views by many of his Jeffersonian opponents were exaggerated and distorted. Rights and Duties is well worth reading.