Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, an author unique in American letters for the attraction she exerts. Her life was cut short by disease, and she wrote only two novels and two collections of short stories—yet she has a reputation among American writers of the twentieth century. Further, she was Southern, and her stories tend to be about the South, but she is nevertheless beloved in both the North and the West. Stranger still, she is a Catholic with a reputation among the new, post-Protestant Americans.

O’Connor is so widely beloved because there is something about storytelling that makes us think she may know us better than we know ourselves. Her context is the American context—the great transformations of the continental democracy in the post-war era. Despite the vastness of those themes, she looks at major social movements from a certain distance which, paradoxically, encourages her readers to enter into the intimacy of her characters—to search their hearts, in a way that’s only possible in times of great changes, when our hopes and fears become unsettled.

The questions O’Connor’s approach makes her readers ask may even help lead us to self-knowledge. Of the Catholic readers, one would have to ask: Why do they like O’Connor’s black comedy so much? Of the Northern readers, one would ask: Why do they like the social observation of the very stratified class society of the South so much? More broadly, of the post-Protestant audience, one has to ask: Why do they wish to see the conjunction of violence and grace that marks her storytelling?

Two of her stories help us begin to answer that question. The title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge, O’Connor’s second collection of short stories published in 1965, the year after her death, is one example of her distinctive style. Julian, our protagonist, is a restive college graduate of no particular ability—and an aspiring writer who does not write—living somewhere in the South with his mother. He resents everything about her, partly because she’s frivolous, partly because he owes her so much and believes he will never be able to repay her, and partly because of her apparent racism.

Julian is what his mother wanted him to be: handsome, college educated, a young man with a future. He believes himself to be her martyr, nonetheless, and believes he made something of himself despite her. The irony, of course, is that he is unable to truly do anything in the world. Julian may be considered an apostate—he despises the genteel world in which he was raised and desperately wants to have success as a liberal in the form of intellectual applause and the moral approval of black people, of whom he really knows nothing. Despite these revolutionary visions, there is something strangely innocent about Julian.

One night, taking his mother to her exercise class, he decides to humiliate her on the bus, for her condescending, grandmotherly behavior to a small black boy who wants her attention. He gets his wish. In the midst of their funny and annoying little family drama, there is a moment where their disagreement turns theoretical and raises the question: What does it mean to be human? Julian believes mind is what matters, his mother believes it’s the heart. He’s a liberal—mind could possibly bring us all together, overcome race differences, for example, in the way math can overcome any political difference—mind can make us one. She’s all about class, since heart or character is determined by upbringing.

The story suggests that there’s much to each argument and also that each is, in a specific way, wrong. Your upbringing can’t be who you are, or else there would never be misunderstandings between parents and children who are brought up well, much less the drama of Julian and his mom. She must mean she wishes people had more heart. But also, mind, which separates the smart and the stupid, cannot be the answer as to why Julian ostentatiously prefers black strangers to his mother. Moreover, he can’t quite see that his insistence on mind should lead him either to self-knowledge or to theoretical science—either way, it wouldn’t sustain his self-pity or moralism. But instead of distancing himself from his own passions, he’s just trying to break his mother’s heart. Since Julian’s family is falling apart and America is changing, these questions that seem to threaten to pull the human being apart cannot be avoided. The things we used to take for granted are now painful rather than reassuring.

I take the title “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to be an ironic reference to a phrase by the heretical Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the story, people converge in their fallenness—Julian, his nameless mother, etc.—and the idealism of rising above the human condition is a matter of cruelty rather than wisdom, since it does not involve rising above oneself but rising above others, who must be lowered. Even rising to achieve equality—a black lady with the same hat as a white lady, or sitting in the same seats—involves too much anger.

O’Connor’s story reveals the fundamental tension at the core of civil rights. The ‘60s may have seemed to the world a period of moral triumph, in both iconic protests and landmark legislation, but the heady atmosphere of the time also led to a kind of moral collapse through division, fear, and hatreds, which ultimately produced race riots. If civil rights are strictly a matter of law concerning public things, they must involve the privatization of opinion. In Julian’s liberal utopia, people have to stop noticing things which, if said aloud, would lead to conflict. Accommodation would be difficult, unsatisfying to everyone, and there’d be no special virtue in being in favor of civil rights. To achieve that special importance, to embody a moral ideal, one would have to think of civil rights as a judgment of private opinions and private associations, too, done in full view of the public, with the instruments of the state, since it would require proving who is of pure heart and who is a racist and then acting on that proof in order to prove that moral superiority makes a difference in ordinary life. Everyone would end up looking racist, as in the story.

In their small way, O’Connor’s characters show us the American drama. In a middle-class society, parents want a better life for their children, but that requires social reform as well as educational reform. For kids to rise above their parents is also for the young to end up judging, and perhaps even damning the old. College kids are almost inevitably revolutionaries. Progress makes ingrates. The black family in the story is no exception. The mother may wish to proudly separate herself from whites whom she suspects, but her kid, precisely because America is a free country, just wants to attract the old white lady’s attention. That boy, precisely because the old white lady likes him, is breaking his own mother’s heart.

Whereas social revolution through a transformation of racial attitudes is the problem in “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in “The Enduring Chill,” from the same volume, religion is the problem. The protagonist is again a fatherless college boy, Asbury, who returns to the South from New York to his mother, whom he also loathes because she has sacrificed to make something of him. He is deluded about being an artist, but he has failed to write a play he started. Asbury is too weak, too soft to be a revolutionary; although softness has given him sufficient cruelty. Instead, he wishes to have a religious revelation and to die a meaningful death of a mysterious disease—and part of the meaning would be punishment for his mother.

Asbury destroys his writings in advance of his anticipated death and writes his mother a deathbed letter, blaming her for his lack of talent—she treated him like a slave, he went to New York to liberate himself, only to find himself useless. Asbury’s ingratitude is the cornerstone of his liberation. To defy his mother, who likes books like Gone with the Wind, Asbury persuades the black workers in her dairy to join him in revolutionary solidarity by, for example, smoking over the milk or drinking it raw. They do not like him, but they accept a cigarette.

Instead of putting any trust in the local country doctor, Asbury prefers to talk to a priest, a Jesuit preferably—an intellectual. He would like to rival Christ as a “dying god.” It would also give him pleasure because it would humiliate his Protestant mother’s prejudices. The scene, however, turns comic: the no-nonsense priest tells him to pray and tries to catechize him while scolding him for his ignorance, laziness, and carelessness of his near and dear. For once, we see something of a man. Asbury is a momma’s boy who despises his successful late father as a stupid Southerner. Asbury was not brought up by a demanding authority and therefore has no strength of character.

The oddity of the story is that in his foolishness, in playing with death, in turning from the religion of art to religion, Asbury has made two mistakes he cannot take back. He has shown that he is more foolish than the uneducated people who care for him, like his mother and doctor. At the moment, he has committed to live out the remainder of his life with his family, and, too, he has opened himself up to reflection on mortality. He is, like so many young people today, touchy, irritable, and oversensitive. Another way of putting that is, needy. If he cannot have a father, perhaps he can turn to the Father in heaven.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s. O’Connor shows why that collegiate class’s liberalism must fail—it will not lead to a real education or work, but instead encourage a kind of casual cruelty. The young are too inexperienced and irresponsible in our educational system; their ability to read and write confuses them about where they stand to adults, and at the same time tempts them with ideology, which can offer them the victories their sensitivity demands.

Ordinary life in a liberal society can be quite boring, which encourages extreme alternatives, not least because, in being unknown, their dangers can be attractive rather than fearful. Moreover, liberalism itself can be heightened to a demand to tyrannize on principle, attempting, so to speak, to turn all life into a college education where you have to prove you’re able to make the grade. Yet people cannot but fail to rise to the heights of humanity, so Progress is a cruel thing.

O’Connor does us a great favor in making such comedy out of the inner lives of young men who are not particularly impressive, because that’s the middle-class condition which higher education cannot eradicate. There may be a kind of mercy in her interest, her invasion of privacy, if you will, her attempt to know them better than they or their parents know them. We have to take seriously what’s obviously mad about the young, or how are they to become sane? Having gone this far down the liberal path of higher education, we must do it well or come to grief. So we must plunge into the depths of the soul; O’Connor can be a help in this adventure.

Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. However, this shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Before Frey’s arrival, Jacob Howland described how the new university’s board of trustees were business people first, educators second. The lesson learnt here is that who is in charge is as important as who is in the classroom.

Before I discuss university governance and the possibility of reviving liberal education, it would be helpful first to survey the landscape of American higher education. Besides its number (nearly 4,000 universities and colleges) and diversity (private, public, regional, etc.), what makes the American system of higher education unique is the different purposes and values that its array of institutions offers. Some are comprehensive; others are narrow; some are religious; others are civic-minded. This assortment of university missions―and not just generous federal funding―made American higher education “the envy of the world.” What created that envy was a diverse educational marketplace able to cater to the various needs of a continental nation.

What is troubling is the trend that this diversity in university missions is being homogenized into a singular purpose: pre-professional training. The latest manifestation is the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and pre-professional studies (e.g., business, nursing). At the same time, humanities majors have declined by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, with no bottom in sight. Social science majors also have dropped. How did we get here? What are the consequences? And what are the possible remedies?

Authority, Data, and Equality

The factors often cited for the rise of pre-professional training in American higher education are the declines in government funding and high-school student demographics, the increased costs of college tuition and student debt, and the politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Fewer resources and greater costs have led both universities and students to seek a more career-aligned education at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. But there are three additional factors that have played a role that are often neglected. They are authority, data, and equality.

The first is authority: who has the power to recognize the legitimacy of an institution of higher education? To answer this, we must look briefly at the history of accreditation. Starting in the late nineteenth century, accreditation was established to ensure the academic quality of colleges and ease student transfer between schools. Over time, specialized accreditation bodies (e.g., law, medicine) and regional organizations (e.g., the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities) emerged and conferred the authority to recognize legitimate colleges and universities.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the federal government became involved with accreditation with the passage of the G.I. Bill for Korean War veterans. The bill was limited to students enrolled at accredited institutions and designated a peer review process as the basis for evaluating institutional quality. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) were authorized to recognize reputable accrediting bodies. That is, neither the federal government nor CHEA accredits individual institutions, but published a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Without the imprimatur of that list, federal student loans were not eligible to colleges and universities. While there are some exceptions, American universities and colleges need access to those student loans in order to stay financially afloat.

This traditional division of supervising higher education―the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, accreditors examine educational quality, and states focus on consumer protection―was changed in the 1960s and 1970s with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors. With access and consumer protection incorporated into their mission, accreditation bodies now monitor schools so that all students and groups have equal access to education and that universities demonstrate students are learning (assessment).

These two responsibilities are amenable to metrics of quantification. For example, access is determined by such metrics as how many students receive financial support, graduate, and become employed afterwards. Assessment likewise has been transformed from qualitative peer reviews and self-studies to numerical data that correlates with student learning objectives. Universities are accountable to these metrics, with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.

Accreditors, therefore, not only have appropriated more power but have channeled that power into the currency of quantifiable data. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with relying upon data to make evaluations about academic quality. However, the data accumulated for these evaluations are divorced from educational achievement, e.g., looking at post-graduate salaries rather than foreign language passage rates. Academic quality, consequently, is defined by these metrics and misses not only educational learning but also evaluations of students’ character and the interiority of their lives. Such currency flattens educational distinctions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks not only of the humanities and social sciences but more broadly of liberal education. By contrast, STEM and pre-professional studies align well with quantifiable metrics because of the nature of how they structure and disseminate knowledge.

This support of the datafication of the university is, in turn, a manifestation of the American value of democratic equality. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent. It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amenable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself. In democratic societies, everyone relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.” But because everyone is equal, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by easily quantified data.

Data, consequently, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can challenge it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. When universities apply data appropriately―such as student retention and graduation―schools can learn where they fall short and remedy it. The problem today is that universities only use data to measure against standards that seem objective, like post-graduate salaries. This, in turn, replaces the diverse and competitive market of American higher educational missions with the monopoly of pre-professional training. The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

Beyond the Mandarin Class

Given this landscape of American higher education, those who seek leadership roles must follow this path of numerical counting―a path antithetical to liberal education. Values like wonder, discovery, and purpose are resistant to meaningful quantification. The result is an administrative class and leadership that think, speak, and decide on data alone.

When higher education is publicly discussed, it is often characterized in terms of ideological, cultural, and curriculum battles between left and right. What is missing in this conversation is the need to address how administrators and board members understand higher education and how it is manifested in the missions of their schools. The concerns of finances, as expressed in data, are critical for the health of the university, but even more so is the question of values and purpose. The datafication of the university can’t answer these questions. Only humans can.

The first step that schools can take to promote a diverse and competitive market of higher education is to provide instruction to board members about the history of education and the institution that they are leading. One of the oddities of American higher education is that board members often lack an understanding of the history and purpose of education, even that of the institution they lead. As a result, these members approach the university from their own perspectives, which are usually from a business mindset since many are asked to serve in part because of their financial contributions and their professional networks. To introduce these members to the history and purpose of education would expose them to a different set of values that can’t be captured by data.

The second step is for faculty to reassert their roles as administrators. While there are circumstances when it makes sense to bring in an administrative leader from outside the institution, it is frequently better for the university that faculty be promoted as administrators within―and then only for a limited period before they rotate back into faculty. One of the results of this faculty responsibility is that university culture benefits in terms of institutional memory and a sense of continuity and community. Administrators have a stake in the long-term health of their institution and are perceived by faculty as part of the university rather than apart from it. Again, another oddity of American higher education is that more than 80 percent of college presidents are external hires compared to 30 percent of CEOs of major corporations. The consequence is that a president upsets the university applecart in pursuit of new metrics of success, only to depart soon after for the next gig, leaving faculty and staff resigned to the next experiment of another incoming leader.

The third step is for the school as a whole to determine its mission: what are its values and educational purpose? This is not just faculty and administrators but includes students, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. Then the school must ask itself how they―from board member to president to student to staff―hold themselves accountable and evaluate success? For now, quantifiable metrics will be required, especially for accreditation reports, but these are not the only ways to determine accountability and success. For instance, qualitative methods exist to evaluate leadership accountability and student success. And even more meaningful are the relationships that are sustained between alumni and the university, faculty and students, staff and administrators. While these relationships cannot be measured, they can be articulated and provide purpose for people and the institution they serve.

The fourth step would be to provide alternative methodologies for how accreditation bodies and governments evaluate schools. As stated previously, there is a value in data to evaluate universities, but it should be one among many tools. Higher education leadership and public pressure can nudge governments and accreditation bodies to be more open to non-numerical assessment. But more importantly, scholars and educators need to devise different methodologies and practices to evaluate academic quality and standards for their institutions. These could include entrance and exit examinations, qualitative assessment, and student portfolios.

The fifth and final step is to articulate and demonstrate the value of the type of education one’s institution offers. This particularly applies to those colleges whose mission is liberal education. Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting. They must find ways to blend the old and the new―the perennial principles of liberal education with the current circumstances of today―to promote liberal education’s promise that in studying it one becomes authentically human.

The challenges that American higher educational institutions confront are myriad, from a loss of public trust to government funding cuts to declining student enrollment. But what is neglected in this conversation is the loss of mission diversity―of values and purposes―that traditionally has characterized the marketplace of American higher education. It is this diversity that has served this vast continental country well.

The repurposing of the University of Tulsa’s Honor Program is representative of a troubling homogenization trend in American universities. Liberal education colleges and programs are its most recent casualties, but if this trend continues unabated, the variety in American higher education will disappear. To prevent this from transpiring, American higher education leaders need to think and rethink their institutions’ values and purpose and discover new ways to make the old seemingly new.

Anthony Kronman is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and his latest book, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age, offers a fresh conservative theory. The argument starts from his conviction that the Enlightenment’s ideals of equality, toleration, and scientific rationality define “the civilization we call home.” He believes there is “wide and stable agreement” about the worth of these liberal principles, so our political problem is that of the classical humanist: how best to cultivate the soul morally and aesthetically.

True Conservatism insightfully poses a double challenge. On the one hand, it forces conservatives to lay their cards on the table. Is their anti-modernism really a dissent from the high ideals of the Enlightenment? For instance, post-liberal conservatism argues that liberalism incubates massive and recalcitrant inequalities between city and countryside, white- and blue-collar workers, and the oligarchs of the contemporary means of communication and users. The core complaint is a shortfall in equality, confirming Kronman’s observation that “we are all progressives by default.” If conservatism is to resonate, it must make an honest peace with modernity. 

On the other hand, Kronman challenges progressives. Are we wise to junk a tradition that taught the West how learning and beauty train the proud to gloriously manage their passions? Are we edified by immodestly mocking an inheritance that has made us more cultured? If conservatism must reconcile with modernity, progressivism must embrace the humanist’s cultivation of excellence and piety. 

Kronman superbly frames politics between Enlightenment rule of law and the humanist’s refined liberty. He is a syncretic thinker—which I admire—but has he done enough to show how Enlightenment rationalism sits comfortably with humanism?

False Conservatisms 

Descartes kicked off modernity with the epistemological problem of whether we ever know the world around us, and Kronman holds fast to verifiable knowledge: “the truth is preeminently what science declares it to be.” Much of Kronman’s conservatism stems from his love of the Great Books, but nowhere does he dwell on the varieties of evidence and proof that humanism employs. The humanist’s broad theory of truth haunts Kronman’s treatment of allegiance, specifically his struggle to find a stable place for love within his reason-based political order. 

Kronman argues that the progressive’s skepticism towards love of family, nation, and God mutilates the spirit. Historically, conservative allegiance follows the ordo amoris. A recent controversy in American politics, the order of charity depicts love expanding from self to family, then community and country, and finally cresting in love of God. Metaphysically, these ordered loves cascade from the font of God’s love. Kronman’s anxiety over the voluntarism in Christianity’s cosmology of love makes Kronman privilege the God of the arch rationalist, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a deity that does not love. Kronman’s appeasement of scientific progressivism triggers a theoretical incongruity that ill suits humanist elegance. The incongruity is that Spinoza’s God does not ground the ordo amoris. We love and sacrifice; God does not. 

True Conservatism opens: “The rich and enlightened societies of the modern West are the most prosperous, tolerant and democratic the world has ever known … a sober observer may be forgiven for thinking that ours is the most brilliant civilization that has ever existed—because it is.” An echo of the famous End of History thesis by Francis Fukuyama is clearly heard, and Kronman believes the achievement of the Enlightenment emboldens progressives to further enshrine liberal ideals in our institutions and mores. After all, liberal nations have been, he believes, “the leading edge of a global revolution,” one that has defeated “the great reactionary movements.” 

Churlishly discounting this great achievement, “the conservative cause has lost its way,” concludes Kronman. His resources are the Great Books, and so recent conservative theorists are not highlighted—there is no mention of Roger Scruton or Patrick Deneen, and Alasdair MacIntyre only gets brief mention in a footnote. Enough is said, however, to help us place Kronman’s theory amongst contemporary options. 

Libertarians, he argues, exaggerate equality since they validate any consumer choice, even if it offends “beauty and truth.” Neutral about value preferences, libertarianism undermines “the Ciceronian ideal of connoisseurship,” where the arts and sciences build character. Amongst other false conservatisms presented, Scruton likely qualifies as a Humean. In David Hume’s political thought, custom orients us politically. With its emphasis on history, Kronman concludes that Hume’s politics is an irrationalism, of a piece with his skepticism towards science as hard truth.

In Kronman’s telling, even an Aristotelian-Thomist like MacIntyre is ultimately wedded to Christian voluntarism, obedient to mysteries that cannot be rationally explained. Deneen’s post-liberal political theology similarly falls foul of the same irrationalism. 

Delusional Progressivism

Contemporary conservatism fails because it either undermines human grandeur or is irrational. Progressivism also has deep problems, however. Riding the coattails of scientific progress, progressivism is a “destructive illusion,” victim to arrogant self-sufficiency. Our “ruling prejudices” maintain that God is merely a private belief, nation an accidental attachment, and forebearers worthy only of criticism, not care. This lack of humility is not a recipe for ennoblement. Historically, Western achievement has built on the legacy of classical humanism.

Bedeviling our age is “the demotion of excellence,” the product of “a spirit of plebiscitarian rule.” Contrasting with our egalitarian self-congratulation, “judgements of rank are pervasive in classical literature and philosophy.” Kronman credits Augustine with moderating “Cicero’s aristocratic hauteur,” but after egalitarian exaggeration, Christian beneficence itself needs tempering by the cut and thrust of Attic competition. 

Christianity softened ancient aggression by proposing that all humans are created in the image of God, an image of love between persons. Since Christian conservatism is unworkable, a better foundation for equality is needed. The imago dei is, Kronman cleverly proposes, merely “an interpretative gloss on a more primitive duty,” one better captured by Heidegger’s idea of the clearing. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) excavated the early Greek astonishment at the sheer fact of human intellect. Of a piece with his rationalism, Kronman believes that intellection provides better protection of human worth than the capacity of persons for love: moral consideration is owed to “all who share the experience of standing out from the world in the ecstatic awareness of time that is the root of every human endeavor.” Appreciating that persons are “companions of the clearing” secures equality, thinks Kronman, and in addition, empowers liberty to act again on the humanist’s appreciation that “excellence is sovereign among values.” 

Tying dignity to intellectualism comes with a cost, however, and undermines Kronman’s account of friendship. 

To the equality, toleration, and scientific rationality that define us, Kronman should have added commerce. Our civilization is the product of an Industrial Enlightenment, and I wish Kronman had spent time on Adam Smith, specifically his portrait of a true friend. The amiable man, says Smith, is someone of “the most exquisite sensibility” who through sympathetic restraint aligns his sentiments with those around him: “When we bring home to ourselves the situation of his companions, we enter into their gratitude, and feel what consolation they must derive from the tender sympathy of so affectionate a friend.” 

The political problem of law and liberty requires the balance of sense and sensibility. Alert to the debt all owe to family, country, and the divine, conservatism reasonably adds humility to liberal self-assertion. This necessary supplement regards sentiment, not axioms. Humanist modesty is less about judgement and more about trust, less about propositions and more about gratitude. Hence, Aristotle’s wide definition of reasonableness in Poetics: “Under reasoning fall those effects which must be produced by language; these include proof and refutation, the production of emotions (e.g. pity, fear, anger, etc.), and also establishing importance and unimportance.”

Consistent with his rationalism, Kronman employs a cognitive account of friendship. His model is biography. “Who are we, really? We wonder but never know. Only our successors are in a position to say.” A biographer, Kronman argues, makes a person better known—but not necessarily better loved. Family members and ancestors, says Kronman, “deserve the honest afterlife that only their successors can give them.” The same turn to honest appraisal of friends figures in Kronman’s patriotism. 

“A life without patriotism is as incomplete in human terms as a life without friends and for the same reason.” All have need of roots, he believes, and the peculiarities of geography and history are inescapable. “The goal of American life is to make it possible for each of us to be proud of our accidental inheritance.” Lest he go back into Hume, however, Kronman emphasizes judgment: even more than a friend under a searching biographical lens, country is “more properly subject to moral review.” Once under judgment, loyalty “to the good in an inheritance” can be calibrated. We are far from Smith’s idea of amiable friendship. Rather, a rational probing of allegiance is the first emphasis, not gratitude for, and taking consolation in, familial and national inheritance.

Reason and Roses

The progressive’s marginalization of the divine is a losing wicket, says Kronman, for “every religion is a response to the universal human longing for a connection to eternity.” However, progressives are right to be suspicious of Christianity. If Spinoza is the hero of the argument, Augustine is its villain. To be modern, conservatism must separate itself from the irrationalism of Augustine’s voluntaristic cosmology of love. About good political order, Kronman says, “the post-Augustinian answer is, only an order that has been freely willed by the individual or community whose order it is.” This voluntaristic construction was unknown to the ancients, and only with Spinoza is a complete rationalism reintroduced into the West. 

Spinoza offers, Kronman relates, “a God that is nothing but explanation and necessity, from whose nature the orthodox Christian attributes of freedom and will have been completely expunged” (emphasis original). Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.” To the mystery of uncaused action, Spinoza opposed “implacable logic,” and only the latter is compatible with scientific positivism, believes Kronman. 

Kronman’s presentation of Spinoza makes explicit the tension that dogs his effort to reconcile scientism and humanism. Quoting Spinoza, Kronman relays that God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essence.” There is thus an “infinite gap”—and not an analogy—between God and humans. By contrast, the long humanist tradition—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern—relies on congruity (convenientia) for the link between God, cosmos, and persons. In humanism, congruity connotes a comely and harmonious connection rather than strict implication. 

Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric gives an example of congruity. He argues that in addition to science there are proofs of character that persuade: “Proofs from character are produced, whenever speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence—we more readily and sooner believe reasonable men on all matters in general and absolutely where precision is impossible and two views can be maintained.” In appealing to the person of Jesus, Christian humanism dwells on a person’s character to convey the difficult truth that friendship involves sacrifice (John 21:15-25). The life of Jesus is a reasonable proof that love and sacrifice are the height of humility and grandeur. 

An example of an incongruity is Spinoza’s God of necessity and implacability, which is not an example of divine friendship and sacrifice in sympathy with our friendship and sacrifice. Dante’s rose explains. True Conservatism closes by reflecting on Spinoza’s signet ring engraved with a rose along with the Latin Caute, meaning caution. The lesson of the ring, proposes Kronman, is the conservative truth that wariness must attend endeavor. In contrast, the humanist Dante depicts cosmic order as a comely rose. In the rose, the world of spirits coheres with humans, the petals and the Trinity, the ovary (Paradiso XXXI). In a congruous conservative humanism, Dante has the angels flitting around like bees “inflowering” the people with the divine sacrificial love of which human dignity is worthy.

The image of a white picket fence and a house to call your own often comes to mind when discussing the American Dream, but this image is just a shallow reflection of a much deeper concept. It may be true that the dream is actualized through meaningful access to housing; however, it is ultimately about living freely and flourishing by adhering to the ideals of the American Founding, through which one pursues happiness and reaches one’s fullest potential. That dream is made possible when individuals have access to housing that is affordable, well-located, and suited to different lifestyles.

Without these preconditions, the American Dream is much harder to achieve.

Yet for decades, institutional barriers have threatened this foundation. Zoning laws, restrictive regulations, and environmental policies are just the beginning of many obstacles that drive up the cost and limit access to housing opportunities. This bureaucratic entanglement in the world of real estate is no accident. Inflated prices and restricted housing access are prime examples of the consequences of a political philosophy that fears growth and rewards obstruction.

To prevent the consequences of unchecked regulatory policies, we must change our institutional arrangements in order to strengthen private property rights. The expansion of housing opportunities will result from the protection of private property by minimizing restrictive regulations. Housing policy must, therefore, be evaluated by a deeper standard that asks whether it will help or hinder the pursuit of happiness in America.

The American Dream and Where It Happens

In pursuing the promise of the American Dream, individuals primarily seek housing that they can afford. Yet securing housing within a budget is often insufficient for reaching one’s full potential. Various living options provide individuals with communities that better align with their needs and goals.

The location of a house not only determines housing prices and the type of community, but is crucial in providing access to work opportunities. It is of little use if an affordable home is not close enough to specific job markets and transportation. Moreover, housing located near schools and fitting job opportunities better enable people to find work that aligns with their goals.

However, location is not the only thing that matters. There must also be a variety in housing options. Different housing is necessary for people of different ages and stages in their careers and financial situations. Access to housing fitting their specific situation allows them to lead fulfilling lives.

Access to appropriate housing, however, is becoming more and more difficult. For example, according to a recent Realtor.com survey cited by Fox Business, 75 percent of US adults still consider homeownership an essential component of the American Dream. However, the US homeownership rate has declined to around 65 percent as of late 2024—a clear signal that while the goal is still widely valued, many are simply unable or unwilling to attain it. The access to housing “services” is not achieved only or always by ownership, but the disparity between those who see ownership as vital and those who can actually own a home is indicative of a broader problem.

This growing space between dreams and reality is not coincidental. When regulations restrict growth—when permitting takes years and fees and prices strangle new development—the opportunity to flourish is diminished. The limitation of where people can live ultimately limits who those individuals can become.

Housing Diversity and the Anti-Industrial Ethos

However, on top of obvious natural market conditions, people are often priced out of suitable areas by restrictive zoning laws that inflate costs further. This only makes the ideal home increasingly unattainable. These roadblocks are not only the result of bureaucratic oversight but are indications of resistance to healthy growth and development. Today, people no longer embrace the idea of building more homes with enthusiasm. They act with suspicion and resistance. This resistance reflects a broader agenda that seeks to limit growth in the name of environmental protection and restrain technology. It sees development as a threat to character and calls for nature to be protected for its own sake.

In The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand argued that many modern intellectuals treat progress as dangerous. For them, “Technology is man’s enemy and should be restricted or abolished.” While she wrote provocatively, her insight is pertinent.

Arguably, this mentality dominates policies affecting housing today. Regardless of the meritorious aims hoped to be achieved by zoning regulations, in city after city, new housing proposals are greeted not with welcome but with protest. Growth is seen as an assault on the environment, a force that must be stopped. This cultural suspicion of building is not rooted in data—it is an aesthetic and moral reaction. It favors the static over the dynamic, the known over the possible, as embodied in the “precautionary principle” behind many regulatory decisions. This mindset animates NIMBYism, fuels procedural delay, and gives rise to a legal culture that elevates environmental review over economic need.

One of the clearest examples of legal boundaries deteriorating into extreme anti-industrialist policy is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Its original goal was to ensure that the federal government considered environmental factors when developing major projects. However, as noted in a recent article, what began as guiding principles that called for environmental consideration resulted in out-of-control green tape.

NEPA and other anti-industrial policies have a chokehold on meaningful project development, causing costly delays and hindering innovation. When environmental policy is fueled by restriction rather than guidance, the result is not greener cities but fewer homes, longer commutes, and higher living costs.

Public Choice and Political Failure

Cultural opposition does not entirely explain the issues in our housing system. To understand the deeper failures in housing, we must also look to the incentives that drive decision-making on every level.

Public choice theory analyzes political behavior and the incentives that drive self-interest. The theory begins from a simple premise: people are people, whether they work in the private or public sector. Their behavior is shaped not by moral superiority or institutional label, but by rules and rewards. Zoning commissions and planning boards, accordingly, are not populated by angels, but respond to external pressure from organized homeowner groups, vocal opponents of change, and entrenched interests with something to lose. 

With housing, this explains why zoning commissions are often driven by vocal homeowners who resist development to protect their property values, while those who would benefit from more housing—young renters and future residents—are unorganized and underrepresented. The result is a system of prevention and delay rather than abundance and opportunity.

To paraphrase James Buchanan, these problems are structural, not just personal. Restoring a housing environment fit for the American Dream requires more than replacing officials. It requires reforming the rules that shape their decisions. Land use governance must be redesigned to reduce barriers and protect the freedom to build from politically powerful opposition. We must evaluate political outcomes by examining rules, incentives, and structures—not merely intentions. The structure of land use decision-making rewards delay, empowers obstruction, and penalizes innovation. Thus, high prices and long waits are predictable outcomes. The system is working as it was (inadvertently) designed.

This system of incentives does not just slow housing development—it actively limits the types of housing before they can even be built. For example, many cities ban the construction of duplexes or require minimum lot sizes through zoning. These rules force builders to focus on homes that are large and expensive instead of more affordable ones. Furthermore, the artificial boundaries of urban areas restrict where development can occur and, in turn, raise prices within those limits.

By preventing diverse housing options such as apartments or duplexes, communities shut out housing that would provide young people and those with less means stability and room to grow. Here, the system does not offer what people need. Supply is far from demand, not because the market cannot reach equilibrium, but because restrictive policy prevents it.

This systemic issue is not only economic but human. The restrictions that cause high prices, long commutes, and other limitations directly undermine the promise of the American Dream.
For example, New York City recently eliminated rental brokerage fees and is on track to broaden rent freezes, allegedly to protect renters, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. These regulations quickly backfired. Landlords raised rents by hundreds of dollars, often outweighing initial savings. As the WSJ article put it, the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act (FARE) “lit a fire under pre-existing rent growth,” forcing prices higher in an already strained market.

New York’s current housing market shows how price controls and procedural barriers sustain the crisis, shift costs, and create roadblocks. When incentives are skewed, well-meaning policy often backfires. The very renters these polices claim to be helping are the people who pay the price.

The Housing Question and the American Dream

Everything we have argued so far should not be interpreted as claiming that some of the interests protected by zoning and environmental regulations are illegitimate or not worth protection.

Our argument is that there is a better way of balancing competing claims and making them harmonious by private covenants and case-by-case decisions. Renewed respect for property rights is preferable to bringing in the coercive power of the state to situations that cannot possibly be assessed ex ante by legislators or assumed to be taken by impartial and not interested regulators.

If legislators and regulators can be pressured by one or other group, there is no reason to believe that justice will be done. The most politically savvy group will win, as countless cases in which zoning rules are “adjusted” to attend to special interests demonstrate. What is given by coercion may be taken by coercion, with all the deleterious consequences in terms of growth that uncertainty causes. That is the lesson of zoning practice, not one of protection of individual rights.

Ultimately, the American Dream should be discussed in moral or cultural terms; behind every dream, however, lies a material structure that makes it possible. Housing is not just shelter—it is the infrastructure of human flourishing.

Today, the Dream is not threatened by market forces but by policy failures and ideological resistance. Many fear growth, distrust builders, and reward delay. This logic must be reversed. Growth should no longer be treated as a vice but as a public good. Preserving the American Dream requires us to challenge the cultural suspicion of abundance by reforming zoning and streamlining permitting. Most importantly, it requires us to recognize that housing is not merely a special interest but a human need essential to freedom and flourishing.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

With a few weeks of perspective, what can we say about the brief conflict between Iran and Israel?

It doesn’t matter that much that Iran’s nuclear program was not “obliterated,” as the Trump administration claimed. No one believes it was. The world’s leaders and media have long since factored in Trump’s hyperbole and learned to put a steep discount on such words. That’s a telling commentary on American diplomacy under Trump. But it matters less for Israel and Iran than one might think.

Having bombed Iran once, Israel has definitively demonstrated its willingness to do so again. Trump is more mercurial, but he has at least demonstrated how easily he can be maneuvered into complying with a fait accompli once the Israelis move first. The physical infrastructure of Iran’s program is damaged, not destroyed, and could be repaired. But it could be bombed again.

Which means that more lasting damage has been done to Iran’s appearance of regional strength, to the perception that it would become a nuclear power in due course, and that its enemies and rivals lacked the will to stop it. Those mirages have evaporated for good. The Persian emperor has no clothes.

But he’s unlikely to be graceful about it. Though an armistice was patched together, a de facto state of war exists and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Iran has been waging a hot and cold war against Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors for forty-five years, motivated by its theocratic, revolutionary ideology. What Trump wants to call the Twelve Day War is more accurately seen by Tel Aviv and Tehran alike as a twelve-day campaign in a much longer conflict.

But it is a conflict which Israel, for now, is winning. Having demonstrated unmatched military success and superpower backing, Israel is poised as a regional hegemon. What kind of hegemon it will be remains to be seen. It could act with magnanimity to seek reproachment and peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors, and at least a cold peace with Iran. But neither Israel nor its neighbors seems likely to move that way. The only safe prediction about the Middle East is that it will continue to be plagued by violence, instability, and privation for years to come.

Iran’s Fifty-Year Conflict

Most observers have probably forgotten, or never knew, the details of the longer conflict. They are worth remembering because, despite Americans’ renowned historical amnesia, the rest of the world understands that history matters.

That history includes Iran’s role in the 1983 Beirut bombings, the 1988 tanker war, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, support for Shia militias throughout the Iraq war, and the 2006 Lebanon War. It includes Iran’s ten-year war against Iraq in the 1980s, an attempt to sponsor a coup in Bahrain in 1981, decades of treating Syria and Lebanon like colonies, and its sponsorship of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It includes a troublingly recurrent dribble of reports that Iran had or has some sort of relationship with al-Qaida. And it includes a list of Iran’s half-baked but destabilizing plots: Iran tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US—on US soil—in 2011. It plotted to assassinate former US national security advisor John Bolton in 2021 and 2022. Iran has caused diplomatic incidents with Denmark, Albania, Belgium, and the Netherlands over various failed attacks across Europe. 

Why does Iran do this? Because ideology matters. Despite a century of so-called “realists” telling us that only power matters, most observers intuitively understand that if a state professes a religious duty to seek your death, you are not safe—ask Salman Rushdie. Iran’s ideology is barbaric, inhumane, and at war with the basic tenets of human civilization. Most governments in the world accept the principle of national sovereignty, territorial inviolability, and the legitimacy of the international system. Iran joins a very small group of nations that blatantly, repeatedly, and violently reject those principles.

Israel’s Response

Which is why Israel treated the October 7, 2023, attack as the last straw. When militants from Hamas—yet another Iranian proxy—stormed into Israeli territory and murdered 1,200 people, Israel chose to calibrate its response not to that attack alone, but to a half-century of Iranian aggression and to a century-long campaign by its enemies worldwide to deny its legitimacy and subvert its existence.

Israel was also responding to a long string of ineffective counterattacks. Reagan did nothing in response to the Beirut bombings in 1983; Clinton did nothing in response to Khobar Towers in 1996. Bush fought back against Iranian proxies in Iraq—and lost. Israel fought to a draw in Lebanon in 2006.

Unconventional methods fared no better. The Stuxnet computer virus probably set back Iran’s nuclear program in 2011—but only temporarily. Israel allegedly sponsored the targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists in the 2010s, again to unsatisfying effect. Decades of sanctions and diplomacy only resulted in a deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2015—with ineffective enforcement mechanisms.

Trump took the most drastic—even rash—step when he exacted a small measure of revenge with a drone bomb that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, in January 2020. But for what? The strike was like the 1943 bombing raid that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, minus the war that overthrew his government. It was a one-off with no strategic effect.

That accounts for the present war’s brutality and length. Israel had no patience for another one-off reprisal strike, another round of diplomacy, or an ineffective campaign that only kicked the can down the road. Israel wanted a definitive war. It is probably bloodier than any Israeli conflict since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And Palestinian civilians have paid the price.

The Nuclear Question

In 2016, I argued that Iran was functionally a nuclear power, a “near-nuclear” state whose “acquisition of nuclear weapons is virtually assured.” Because of that, Iran didn’t actually have to cross the nuclear threshold. Regional security dynamics have “already adjusted to treat Iran as a nuclear power.” The US had little choice but to sponsor an Israeli- and Saudi-led regional order to contain Iranian influence, I concluded, which meant “a militarized crisis with Israel is possible and even likely.”

I was wrong about Iran’s “virtually assured” acquisition of nuclear weapons because I was right about the militarized crisis with Israel. What I did not foresee was that Israel would successfully use the looming crisis with Iran to destroy Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Those had been the major obstacles to direct action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Having removed the implicit threat of terrorist retaliation, Israel and the United States were free to go after Iran’s nuclear program with impunity.

In doing so, Israel was following a long-standing doctrine that it will not allow hostile states in its neighborhood to possess nuclear weapons, having bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981 and Syria’s at al-Kibar in 2007. Note that the three different bombings occurred under three different prime ministers in three different decades from two different political parties: the strike on Iran was not solely a function of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership or political agenda, and Israel’s nonproliferation policy will long outlast him.

To Israel belongs the credit for keeping the Middle East nuclear-free—except, of course, for Israel’s own rumored program. Hypocrisy is the price of hegemony. And Israel is the regional hegemon: that much should be clear from the past eighteen months of warfare—if not the past seventy-five years. When a nation can, with impunity, wage war on essentially any of its neighbors at will; use their airspace at will; impose its nonproliferation doctrine on an entire region; assassinate entire terrorist networks; leverage the foreign policy of the world’s sole superpower; and still be the most prosperous and flourishing society in the entire region from Gibraltar to the Kyber Pass, that’s hegemony.

The New Hegemony

What sort of hegemony will it be? That seems less clear, as it depends on the future of Netanyahu’s government and its stance towards the Palestinians, its neighbors, and the future.

The biggest unanswered question of the war is: what next? What is Israel fighting for? It is clear what the war is against: Hamas, perpetual terrorism, Iranian hegemony, and Iran’s nuclear program. But war—effective war, successful war, just war—uses violence to build a better peace. What is the peace that Israel is fighting for?

Netanyahu does not seem to have an answer, and therein lies the problem and the likely seeds of forever war. One could imagine an Israeli Prime Minister seizing the moment to act with magnanimity and courage, as Menachim Begin did when he signed the Camp David Accords, or Yitzhak Rabin did when he signed the Oslo Accords. They could envision peace between Israel and its neighbors that included a place for the Palestinians. Netanyahu is not that prime minister. He is likely to be remembered more for military ambition (and intelligence failure) than diplomatic courage.

Of course, Begin and Rabin had credible interlocutors with whom to negotiate. There is no Palestinian leadership, the Iranian government seems in no rush to talk, and the Arab states are not lining up to join the Abraham Accords. That is their choice—but it means they are standing idle while the era of Israeli military hegemony begins.

If you say just one thing about the ancient Greeks, say that they had good taste. Probably no culture in ancient history was more renowned for the beauty it produced than Athens during its High Classical Period, when the statesman Pericles oversaw a citywide rebuilding project after the Persian invasion of 480 BC. The revolution in arts and letters that followed was era-defining. In Virgil’s Aeneid, when the patriarch Anchises lists off the distinctions of civilizations besides Augustan Rome, he pays his respects to peoples who can “mold breathing bronze” and “coax living faces out of marble.” He doesn’t even have to mention the Greeks by name—every reader would have realized who he was talking about. The way Cubans are known now for their cigars and Scots for their whisky, Greeks were known for making beautiful things.

Today, the word “classical” is practically synonymous with a certain sense of purity and proportion, embodied in fluted columns and lissome marble nudes. But in Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, Hugo Shakeshaft argues that the Greeks were enamored with beauty well before the Classical period. His focus is on the Archaic period, starting around 800 BC when the epic poems of Homer were first composed. Those earlier centuries, Shakeshaft argues, set the stage for Classical authors like Plato to make loveliness itself an object of philosophical scrutiny. “Beauty bore a transcendent power and value in Greek culture long before Plato gave it new life in his philosophical musings,” he writes. As far as we can see from the historical record, the Greeks were always in awe of beauty. If they came to understand it deeply in the age of Plato, that was because they had loved it dearly since the age of Homer. More than that—they held it sacred. That is what Shakeshaft’s book is about.

It is not a book that will be relished from cover to cover by the general reading public. Shakeshaft, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, is a scholar writing for scholars. But that’s what makes Beauty and the Gods so useful as a repository of information on its subject. Those not in the habit of reading academic prose for pleasure will still find it beneficial to consult the book on questions of particular interest. The material is well organized into five chapters on the divine power of beauty in Greek epic, music, natural landscapes, architecture, and figural art. 

Shakeshaft’s approach is a synthesis of art history, literary analysis, and archaeology: there are close readings of famous poems like Homer’s epics and Sappho’s lyrics, but also detailed analyses of vase paintings and temple sites from Delphi to Sicily, richly complemented with color images. The overall effect is a kind of immersion in what the world of Homer and Sappho must have looked, felt, and sounded like. Shakeshaft manages to be nigh on exhaustive within his chosen time period—an impressive feat in itself with such an unwieldy and wide-ranging topic—and he makes some intriguingly subtle arguments along the way.

One early Christian writer (erroneously, but wonderfully) related the Greek word for beauty (kalos) to the word for “call” (kaleō). His point was that beauty, various and difficult to define as it may be, always calls us toward itself. It’s what makes things literally attractive—the alluring face or the body you can’t resist looking at, the room you want to sink into and never leave, the landscape on the postcard that makes you wish you were there. This force of attraction makes beauty feel like a breath of something otherworldly wafting across the earthly plane. If bodies, rooms, and postcards have almost nothing else in common, the thing they share must be something beyond them all, something above our physical existence. In the language Medieval writers came to use, beauty is transcendental, on a par with other eternal ideals like goodness and being. It is in but not of the world.

A tricky thing about beauty when compared with the other transcendentals, though, is how often it seems to be “in the eye of the beholder.” That cliché, in that form, comes from Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s Molly Bawn—a nineteenth-century novel known chiefly for being mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses and for containing that line. Even there, in its first appearance, the saying is described as “an old axiom.” Hungerford wasn’t observing anything about beauty and its subjectivity that ancient Greek authors hadn’t already noticed. In one of her justly famous lines, the poet Sappho declared that “some say the most beautiful thing on the dark earth is a cavalry corps; some say a host of infantry; some say a fleet of ships. I say it’s whatever you love best.” The coy vixens of Lesbos that made Sappho’s heart flutter seemed worlds apart from the lethal weapons that set the blood of more martial poets racing. 

Today, this fact is often cited in support of the fallacy that because beauty is subjective, it must be arbitrary. Archaic Greek thought on the subject was more subtle than that. Of course beauty is necessarily something we perceive (what else would it be?), and it’s true, if somewhat trivial, that different people sometimes perceive it in different things. More interesting is the fact that the experience provoked by beauty—the flutter of the heart, the racing of the blood—is recognizably similar from person to person. The Greeks were aware of this too, and they called the universal longing that beauty inspires by the name of love. It was, they sensed, a primordial force holding the world together. “Love, most beautiful among the deathless gods,” was one of the first deities to set the world in motion according to Homer’s rough contemporary, Hesiod. In this mythology, writes Shakeshaft, love “represents the generative force of attraction driving the cosmos’ evolution.” 

This is an idea with a long afterlife. It helped inspire Dante’s vision of God as “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” It seemed to Francis Bacon like a precursor to the scientific principle that certain universal forces explain and drive “the natural motion of the atom.” Whatever the powers are that draw fire upward through the air and bind the chemical compounds of our bodies together, they are closely related—if not identical—to the tug that pulls the heart toward beautiful things. The Greeks’ infatuation with beauty was not some frivolous pastime, adjacent to their more serious philosophical interest in natural science. The two pursuits were really one and the same.

To heed the call of beauty in its most refined forms was, for Archaic Greeks, to come cheek to cheek with the ultimate powers of the universe. This is one common thread that Shakeshaft sees running through practically all the sources he reviews, from the writing scrawled on the thighs of votive statues to the poetic reflections of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Beauty is the thing humans share most intimately with the gods in Greek theology: “Deities bestow beauty on mortals, which likens them to deities and attracts their interest as a result.” Other academics have puzzled over Archaic paintings and sculptures, wondering whether they depict gods and goddesses or beautiful young mortals. But Shakeshaft, in a nice bit of anti-pedantry, argues that it may be missing the point of such imagery to try drawing the line too sharply between men and gods. Maybe it’s supposed to be hard to tell the difference. Maybe the whole point is that human loveliness is the closest thing on earth to a vision of the divine form.

If this seems tantalizingly close to the Biblical principle that mankind is made in the image of God, that’s because Greek storytellers were coming from a different angle at core truths that Jewish prophets also embedded into their scriptures. Shakeshaft occasionally takes stock of Near Eastern hymns and poems, including those in the Bible, which dwell on similar themes. “Oh worship the lord,” say the psalms, “in the beauty of holiness!” Few societies on earth, except some very modern ones, have doubted that beauty is a gift shared with this world from beyond. If the Bible tends to emphasize the beauty of holiness, however, the Greeks tended to insist on the holiness of beauty. Wherever they found it occurring in nature, they assumed the gods were there—so much so that the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder had the Greek pantheon in mind when he wrote that “trees served as the first temples of the gods.”

If beauty is sacred, it’s tempting to believe that it’s also a mark of divine favor. The Greeks of the Classical period had a word, kalokagathia, which came from mashing the word for “beautiful” and the word for “good” together. Some interpreters have taken this to mean that, as art historian Alexandra Sofroniew puts it, “the ancient Greeks believed that being beautiful on the outside was a reflection of a good person on the inside.” Shakeshaft deftly puts paid to this notion: “such statements drastically misrepresent Greek sources,” he writes. From Homer on down, Greek writers easily distinguished between what we might call “inner” and “outer” beauty. Among the warriors of the Iliad, Paris on the Trojan side and Nireus on the Greek side are both handsome weaklings with pretty faces but little martial prowess to speak of. All the same, the very idea of kalokagathia betrays a willingness to associate excellence of form with excellence of character. In Greek story and statuary, gods seem just as susceptible as mortals to the misapprehension that being good to look at means being good per se.

This was and remains the most troubling thing about beauty. “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” are often grouped together as the three great transcendentals, and Keats—channeling what he took to be Greek wisdom—even went so far as to say that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But if goodness is obviously good and the value of truth needs little defense, beauty often comes paired with idiocy, frivolity, and outright villainy. It can deceive and perplex as well as enrapture. Beauty is so obviously desirable that it’s hard not to feel as if it should, in a just world, belong to good and moral people. In the real world, things don’t always work out that way. Hesiod may have been right that beauty itself draws the world together in love, but it’s equally true that beautiful things can come imbued with other, more sinister traits. The artists of the Archaic period were alive to this complexity, though they don’t seem to have solved the problems it posed.

In a sense, that may have been what Plato was trying to do in one of his greatest dialogues, the Symposium. Shakeshaft points out that this watershed in the history of thought drew deeply on concepts already latent in the Greek tradition. “Part of its brilliance lay in calling on traditional ideas and repurposing them.” The dialogue is ostensibly a series of speeches in praise of love. When Socrates’ turn comes to speak, though, he relays a lesson he learned from the priestess Diotima about the holiness of beauty. Love is a grasping beggar, a child of poverty, in search of beautiful partners to mate with. But the beauty love finds immediately to hand in the world is jumbled and confused, “tangled up with flesh and men and things and all the rest of that mortal junk.” A soul that wants to refine itself has to examine its own desire for beautiful things—beautiful people, beautiful artwork, beautiful ideas—until it siphons off the essence of beauty that is reflected in all those things and yet distinct from them. In itself, earthly beauty is riddled with impurities. It will eventually decay and deceive. But it is also a glint thrown off from a greater light on high. Understood in that way, it can lead to God.

Shakeshaft refrains from intervening in contemporary politics, but the intellectual history that leads to and from Plato is most definitely still unfolding. A recent Calvin Klein ad, featuring the obese rapper Chika Oranika spilling out of her underwear, has become representative for many of a long-running effort to strip physical attractiveness of any meaning or value whatsoever. Usually this is done by insisting on ugliness where beauty is obviously to be expected. One predictable reaction has come from “vitalists” and other Nietzscheans who assert that toned bodies and square jaws do, indeed, correspond to moral virtue and genetic nobility. President Trump’s intervention into this debate, in both of his terms, has been to issue executive orders “promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.” This translates directly to reviving the neo-classical style favored by America’s early architects. 

Critics of the orders have portrayed them as representing an endorsement of the view that there really is no daylight between kalos and agathos. But there’s another way of looking at things to be learned from the Greek tradition. If it’s wrong to equate visual beauty with moral goodness, it’s also dishonest and unacceptably absurd to ignore the manifest spiritual value of beauty altogether. The trick, as Diotima explained, is to regard even the most ravishing earthly beauty as representative on the physical plane of something much higher on the spiritual plane, something “that always exists and never changes or passes away.” Even the most earnest efforts at artistic revival will fall short unless they aspire upward to that higher source of beauty, the wellspring from which all goodness also flows. There is no true beauty without the gods.

Praise has been nearly universal for Andor. The Disney+ Star Wars TV show, set between the events of Episode III and Rogue One, about the rise of the rebellion against the Empire, had its series finale top the Nielsen ratings, and the overall season has a 96 percent critic rating and an 89 percent audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes. It’s been praised by outlets like The New Republic as “The Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” and won over the popular YouTube critic (and hater of pretty much everything modern Star Wars), “The Critical Drinker.” In an age where fans are divided by nearly everything Star Wars, and all of their projects seem to underperform, this show has seemingly done the impossible. And with the series having officially ended with its second season, there’s very little chance of opinions changing about Andor anytime soon.

One of the most interesting things about discussions around Andor is that, unlike most Star Wars fare, people don’t just see it as a great piece of entertainment but a true work of political art speaking about our time. The New Republic calls it “all too relevant to the real-life politics of 2025.” The New Yorker titled a piece from their website, “How ‘Andor’ Injects Contemporary Politics Into ‘Star Wars’ I.P.” The Guardian argues, “So much of the language in Andor’s second season immediately recalls the fear-mongering that facilitates the current onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza.” Likewise, author and former Youth Pastor John Pavlovitz recently posted on X, “If you watched Andor, you know what’s going on right now in Los Angeles.”

This is where Andor is somewhat problematic. As a piece of TV, Andor is great. As a piece of political commentary, it’s highly dubious. And the more seriously we take it, the worse it makes our politics.

Andor follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a reluctant member of the Star Wars rebel alliance fighting against the Galactic Empire, along with his friends and enemies on either side of the conflict. In the final season, the Empire builds up to creating its greatest weapon: the Death Star, which it can only do if it seizes by force the minerals from the citizens of the planet Ghorman, even though it will mean massacring many of the inhabitants and taking direct control of it.

There’s no doubt that Andor deserves every bit of artistic praise it’s getting. It’s really well-written and mature storytelling against a backdrop of the mythic fable of Star Wars we all love. Characters in Star Wars have never been so layered, so morally grey, so thoughtfully full of contradictions that are so in keeping with how human beings are. Never has Star Wars delved so deeply into why freedom matters, or how complex and morally compromising rebellions are.

Leaders of the rebellion, like Luthen Rael, do terrible things to their followers with an aim to beat the Empire. Senator Mon Mothma tries desperately to balance standing up to the emperor publicly and supporting the rebellion privately without giving him an excuse to jail her. Syril Karn truly believes he’s the good guy for supporting the Empire. Meanwhile, the Empire does not simply invade Ghorman by force. Instead, it resembles real totalitarian regimes by playing a long propaganda campaign that makes their invasion and occupation seem legitimate.

But what makes Andor such great TV is exactly what makes it such bad politics.

While this realism and mature storytelling elevate the material, it fosters problematic implications if you try to apply it to our present-day circumstances. Star Wars works on a binary of good and evil, light and dark sides of the force, the Rebellion and the Empire. That’s great if your film is told like a fairy tale, where these are abstract ideas that took some work to apply to particular situations in our own world. Even where Star Wars has been political before—such as making allusions to Vietnam and George W. Bush—they were abstracted enough that the focus was on the underlying principles, so how you applied that message was up to you.

Yet Andor’s heavily adult storytelling constantly insists you apply the franchise’s childlike reasoning and solutions to real-world adult politics. In the first season, they deal openly with the politics of police brutality and their cover-ups, with private prisons, and the colonial occupation of indigenous peoples. In this season, they check off stormtrooper crackdowns of illegal immigration, sexual assault, and the giant propaganda machine involved in justifying state-sponsored abuse of protestors and genocide—things that either have happened in our own society, or at least reflect charges we are repeatedly accused of.

Moreover, they tend to cast largely the same level of fascist symbolism to all the above abuses. And they condemn as naive anyone who doesn’t see the need to rebel with violence. Mon Mothma’s attempt to fight the Empire above board, the Ghormans’ attempts to protest peacefully, and Sryil’s belief in being a good person within the system all come to ruin. Eventually, this must be replaced by violence and war. Only Luthen—who from the beginning sees violent overthrow as the only option—is validated in the end.

If our society is what’s being critiqued as the Empire, and violent rebellion is the only ultimate solution, then it rather awkwardly sides with those who use political violence in our own country today. Adrienne LaFrance wrote for The Atlantic about the disturbing trend of bipartisan political violence:

In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens.

Most people who love Andor would condemn such violence. But I’m not sure they’re being consistent. Americans increasingly believe we live in a dystopian empire nightmare. And when we are told by fiction like Andor that the only way to stop empires is through violence, choosing violence is hardly surprising.

Even if you buy that we live in a dystopia, it doesn’t follow that violence is usually a good answer. In fact, it’s typically a terrible one. A 2024 comparative analysis of 65 quantitative studies revealed that “nonviolent revolutions generally lead to more positive institutional outcomes than violent revolutions across domains like democracy, security forces, foreign relations, ethnicity, culture, and well-being.” Moreover, “nonviolent resistance movements are more likely to facilitate transitions from autocracy to democracy, improve democratic qualities like civil liberties, transform security forces and judicial systems in rights-respecting directions, and enhance well-being measures such as life expectancy.”

But you hardly need a study to tell you that. History is littered with violent revolutions that were then simply replaced by comparable or worse dictatorships: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc. Meanwhile, famous non-violent revolutions have had great success—particularly in Western countries that Andor’s fans are so quick to compare the show to. Consider the Indian Independence movement and the American Civil Rights movement of the ’60s.

That’s not to say violence is never justified. But you have to be clear when it is and when it is not. This is one place that Andor, for all of its “adult” politicking, doesn’t ever seem to actually wrestle with. What’s the line between a government that does wrong but you can still protest peacefully, and one you can’t? There is a brief debate between the Ghormans that goes nowhere.

This cavalier attitude toward political violence may stem from its very romantic views of freedom and tyranny. The manifesto of freedom by the show’s Karis Nemik from the first season is often quoted by starry-eyed fans and is quoted in the show’s series finale:

Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Not to be mean, but this is silly. Most of world history has been defined by tyranny, and the freedoms we have today developed only with long experience, and were conceptualized by brilliant thinkers like John Locke, Montesquieu, and many more who laid the intellectual groundwork for the kind of freedom we have. It’s why we couldn’t militarily transplant it somewhere like Afghanistan or Iraq. 

This brings us to the most important point. America (or Western civilization, if you want to broaden it) is not the Empire. I’ve written before about how the idea that we live in a dystopian totalitarian hellhole is largely laughable. Not only is violence consistently going down and wealth and prosperity consistently going up for the rich and the poor alike, but rates of racism and sexism are going down, while freedom itself remains robust and continues to grow. We don’t live under an Emperor Palpatine who can direct the entire media as a propaganda machine to his will. (If you don’t believe me, look at the countless news outlets that criticize each democrat or republican president at any given time.) We don’t live under an empire that commits mass slaughter against its own citizens. Perhaps that’s why, where there’s been police brutality in recent years, peaceful protests have brought it down. Perhaps that’s why, when the government tried to mandate COVID vaccines for employees, normal lawsuits got the Supreme Court to strike it down.

The reality is that we like to think that our political opponents are villains, but they’re typically not that different from us. One study showed that both the left and the right vastly overestimated how many people on the other side agreed with extremist views. As author and evolutionary psychologist Steven Stewart Williams described: “For example, lefties guessed that most conservatives wholeheartedly agreed with racist views, when less than a quarter of them agreed even a little. Conservatives, for their part, guessed that most lefties wholeheartedly agreed with banning free speech, when only a third did even slightly.”

So why do we imagine people on the other side are so bad? One reason is that it’s more exciting to imagine the other side is so bad that it justifies violence. As one study showed, “sensation seeking predicts support for a violent activist group.” That’s the appeal of shows like Andor, too. A show about rebels fighting the empire is much more exciting than ordinary people who disagree just a little bit on politics.

It also ironically makes things feel more hopeful. While we might not live in a dystopia, we still have problems in the world. If our problems are due to some villain we can fight and defeat, then the problems might go away. If not, there may be no way to fix them once and for all. As author and Soviet Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.” But the cost is too high. Because if we aren’t living in a dystopia already, we will be the ones who make it that way through our attempt to overthrow it.

Then what can we do? How do we fight the injustices we see in our day and our time? The boring answer is still the true answer. We do what we’ve always done, because it’s worked, and it’s continued to work. We live our ordinary lives, working, loving each other, making art, speaking out, and using the political process to change the world for the better. It’s not as fun as the version we see in Star Wars. But it’s the adult answer.

Andor is a great show that brings a level of adult drama to Star Wars never before seen. But it’s still ultimately a fairy tale. Those wishing to apply the politics of a galaxy far, far away to our own will likely find themselves on the dark side rather than the rebellion. And like Syril, they may not find out until it’s too late.

Can Big Tech save the West? That question is at the heart of Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic. He posits that Silicon Valley really can address the threats, internal and external, America faces—but only if titans of the industry abandon the consumerist model and liberal ideology which defined the sector in recent decades. In this symposium, our writers weigh in on Karp’s vision and its prospects for revitalizing our civilization.

The West faces a crisis of confidence on a scale unseen for decades. Just as an axis of revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—threatens the post-Cold War global order, the citizens of the United States and other countries that have benefited the most from those arrangements are beginning to question its very foundations. Will the rise of right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics knock the United States from her position of leadership? Will the people of the West have enough nerve to defend their freedom against the gathering storm?

In their new book, The Technological Republic, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that America still has the resources to win this fight—and that they can be found in Silicon Valley. Karp is the chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a software company that makes intelligence and defense tools for the US military, and Zamiska acts as head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at the same firm. They believe that Big Tech companies have been focused for too long on digitally serving individual consumers and instead must apply their technical know-how to national security problems for the sake of the common good. Their book is, in a sense, an attempt to articulate what engineers’ skills mean for their vocation as citizens. 

There is something admirably earnest about this vision, especially in an era defined by bitter irony. The authors’ unabashed love for our civilization is bracing, and one hopes that it will help recruit patriotic young engineers for Palantir and similar firms working on national security issues. They are also refreshingly clear about the threats we face, externally and internally, from deeply anti-civilizational forces. The book is therefore an effective call to arms for technologists. At the same time, though, it somewhat lacks a narrative about the overarching meaning of the American Republic sufficiently powerful to move the whole people, something that, as its authors recognize, is absolutely necessary for the coming struggle. 

As we prepare for these challenges, we cannot underestimate the radical change wrought by the Digital Revolution. The wonders coming out of Silicon Valley will upend nearly every aspect of our lives and completely remake our economy, both by automating significant parts of day-to-day work and possibly exposing us to new and terrifying risks from autocracies exploiting these new technologies. Karp and Zamiska argue, therefore, that “the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software.” Figuring out how to handle the great leap in innovation, according to our authors, is the great governance challenge of the twenty-first century.

One model for the kind of solution they proffer is the alliance between science, industry, and the government formed during the Cold War. Originally coming about during World War II (the Manhattan Project looms large in the authors’ minds), these ties became stronger across the long struggle against the Soviet Union. Scientists understood that they played an important role in defending the West against totalitarianism, and political leaders found ways to support and develop their expertise. Karp and Zamiska see the much-maligned “military-industrial complex” as a key reason for America’s victory over Soviet communism and the possible inspiration for a reconstitution of the present-day tech industry.

But the major difference between the Cold War and today’s geopolitical problems, though, is the technological platforms through which conflict is waged. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Digital Revolution commenced, competition was all about producing more ships and planes, guns and ammunition, missiles and warheads. Now, Karp and Zamiska write that we live in a “software century.” They do not dismiss bullets and atoms altogether, but they are more concerned with the bytes behind AI targeting systems guiding drones and robots. To name one example of this possible future from earlier this year, Ukraine launched the first-ever all-drone assault on Russian positions. The future of war is not just mechanized, in the authors’ minds, but also automated.

While it is understandable why executives at a company like Palantir put so much faith in artificial intelligence, it is possible they take the case for automated warfare too far. For one, they somewhat evade the thorny ethical questions surrounding drones and battlefield AI. But more importantly, as the ongoing war in Ukraine proves, conventional weapons still dictate the outcome of conflicts. Of late, the United States has struggled mightily to ramp up production for ammunition, from the more advanced Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to comparatively basic 155mm artillery shells. Developing more advanced weaponry to meet future threats is important to be sure, but so is simply manufacturing enough materiel to defend American interests, given present concerns. Policymakers need to balance futuristic aspirations like Karp and Zamiska’s with the actual needs felt by those already fighting on the front lines. We might be living in a “software century,” but hardware still matters. The defense industry must find ways to advance any technology essential to national security.

That being said, Karp and Zamiska’s diagnosis of what went wrong with Silicon Valley specifically and their prescriptions for fixing it can be applied to revitalize American industry more broadly. They see American corporate life as fundamentally decadent, trapped within the bonds of a noxious consumerism and paralyzing political correctness. Rather than focusing on innovation, they assert that “the vast majority of an individual employee’s energy during their working lives is spent merely on survival, navigating among the internal politicians at their organizations, steering clear of threats, and forming alliances with friends, perceived and otherwise.” Workplace politics distract us all from innovating.

The problems of this decadent hierarchy are compounded by the civilizational nihilism of America’s technocratic elites. Karp and Zamiska thunder against not only the moral relativism endemic to the academy and other commanding heights of culture, but also more radical anti-civilizational impulses that undermine the concept of greatness itself. They rightly cite the deconstruction of Western civilization courses in higher education as one symptom of this terrible disease of self-hatred. How can we innovate on behalf of a civilization we are taught is fundamentally unjust? Why would technologists use their talents to defend a country their mentors and teachers tell them is on the wrong side of history? 

This critique of America’s cultural and political atmosphere goes beyond the countless broadsides against “wokeness” already launched by reactionary malcontents. Before founding Palantir, Karp pursued a career in academia and briefly studied with the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas; he is no man of the right, and therefore his narrative does not sink into all the vapid ideological clichés so much of the right-wing media seems to embrace. Instead, The Technological Republic’s authors opt for a much more sophisticated—and insightful—critique of the state of American capitalism. According to them, in Silicon Valley, the “prevailing ethical framework” has been a sense that we can engineer solutions to all of mankind’s problems. As shiny as this promised future may seem, however, the authors warn that this techno-utopianism “has devolved into a narrow and thin utilitarian approach, one that casts individuals as mere atoms in a system to be managed and contained.” As a result, Big Tech’s leaders often dismiss the enduring moral and cultural questions at the heart of Western civilization as anachronisms or distractions from their humanitarian planning. 

In other words, America’s innovative edge is dulling first and foremost because we are losing sight of the true moral content of our civilization. Rather than embracing a sense of collective purpose or political project of the West, the Silicon Valley tech barons who dominate the economy today adopted a kind of “technological agnosticism,” concerned above all with capturing and monetizing individual consumers’ attention. This is why, they argue, most of the tech innovations in recent years have had more to do with social media and streaming services than actual developments to improve human life in meaningful ways. Silicon Valley unleashed market forces, which have atomized society, largely because we collectively cannot envision a larger end for it. Even philanthropic fads in Silicon Valley, such as “effective altruism,” fail to achieve the sense of collective purpose akin to twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism.

As an alternative to this corporate decadence, Karp and Zamiska call for the “reconstruction of a technological republic” through “a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.” They believe we, as a society, need to give more serious thought to the meaning of the good life and how we can pursue it together, and then apply this teleology to the technological problems of the day. As much as the authors rightly worry about radicals stripping civilizational content from our schools’ curricula, though, they do not offer much by way of an upbuilding alternative. They seem unwilling to fully express their own firm definition of the good life or national identity.

On some level, this is because Karp and Zamiska remain trapped within the paradigm of liberal technocracy. The ultimate source of this problem is that they reject the notion that the American Republic was constituted around a definite conception of the human good. They avow, rather, that the liberalism of the Constitution does not order liberty in one particular direction or another. Western civilization, in the authors’ view, is worth defending not for the sake of any sense of transcendence it bequeaths to its inheritors, but rather because it provides a space in which engineers can best pursue solutions to the chief problems of modern life in more-or-less morally neutral ways.

This open-ended liberalism is deeply entwined with their repeated insistence that “the miracle of the West is its unrelenting faith in science.” They therefore view the proper end of politics primarily as a shield to scientific endeavors and free inquiry, or even a prop to the private firms they believe are pursuing those purposes, rather than orienting society towards certain eternal truths. At certain points in the book, they even hint at support for the troubling possibilities of transhumanism, embracing artificial intelligence almost as though it were an altogether new form of life. As much as some of their foreign policy goals may align with traditional conservative priorities, the authors’ overall conception of the aim of the social contract diverges wildly from the older view that conservatives advocated.

Like most progressives, then, Karp and Zamiska articulate a political theory that remains technical rather than spiritual. They leave open the possibility of faith but do not insist on it as a solution, which means their framework for thinking about self-government will collapse into the same kind of hollowness as the corporate decadence they would have us escape. Despite their prophesying about changes the future could bring, they cannot quite provide a compelling account of the permanent things in human nature worth fighting for.

For the Founders of the American Republic, by contrast, freedom was nothing less than the holiest of causes. In his first inaugural address as president, for instance, George Washington insisted that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government” depended on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” For him, as for the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the soldiers who fought the Revolution, maintaining a free republic against tyranny was a truly civilizational mission with a deeply theological importance. To them, freedom was the highest good, not just because it is an efficient way of organizing society, or even because it opens up inquiry and innovation, but instead because a free society is the kind best suited to human nature. The Founders understood that liberty is one of the deepest longings with which human souls are endowed. The case for the West—the case for victory—cannot be made in full apart from that conviction. 

The Founders paired this robust conception of human nature and liberty with a profound appreciation of the limits of power that Karp and Zamiska seem to lack. In many ways, this republic was actually constituted around this idea of dignity in order to resist the ideology of boundless progress that would later become so popular in Silicon Valley. In his famous Newburgh Address, Washington himself declared that the “last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining” was a kind of enlightened restraint and a rejection of all forms of absolute power. In promoting this ethical critique of tyranny as the root of American citizenship, the Founders were embracing the philosophical core of the Western heritage—something later revolutionists, from France to Germany to Russia, instead rejected. 

While the American Revolution was by no means a simplistic Luddite reaction against technological development, its humane premises should leave its inheritors deeply skeptical of any and all attempts to use technology to transcend our nature. And in the global arena especially, our country’s finest hours have always come when we resist the temptation of appeasing autocratic and totalitarian forces, even when they make revolutionary appeals to progress or deploy powerful new technologies. The American Republic was not just constituted to promote prosperity or innovation, but rather, above all, to assert a certain vision of the human good itself.  

In the end, that is why it will take much more than Silicon Valley optimism to secure the future of freedom. Despite these shortcomings, though, The Technological Republic is a significant book partly because it can help readers understand the very real industrial and digital challenges posed by the modern world. But even more importantly, reflecting on our responsibilities to uphold a virtuous liberty in these tumultuous times can remind us that we are not simply consumers in a technological economy, but citizens of a great and humane republic.

Participants in mass political discourse have an unfortunate tendency to define their own beliefs simply as the negation of their enemy’s. Just say the opposite of what the bad guys are saying, and you must be right. Witness how many “never-Trumpers” wound up becoming progressive Democrats to spite the “Orange Man” or how the desire to “own the libs” has become almost the only recognizable quality of most “conservative” Internet figures. 

For the last half-century at least, the left has defined itself largely in opposition to the inherited political, social, and cultural traditions of the Western world, in what Roger Scruton called a “culture of repudiation.” Anything that can be identified as a product of “white,” “European,” “Western,” or “American” values is suspect at best—the outgrowth of a hegemonic power structure that maintains itself on the backs of the oppressed. Such an attempt (more on that later) to reject their cultural inheritance wholesale has distorting effects—not just on their own minds, but also on their opponents’. One such effect is that anyone who declares himself in favor of Western civilization or America is perhaps too readily embraced as a worthwhile voice.

But not all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And not all who cry “Western Civilization!” are actually friends of the civil order, culture, and freedoms that Western countries have been blessed to enjoy. Enter the tech bros.

Palantir executives Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a book that bemoans the rejection of Western civilization. It argues that patriotism is important. It is critical of wokeness. It makes a case for greater emphasis on humanities education. For these reasons, The Technological Republic has found admirers—mostly among conservative readers. But while it may recognize several troubling trends, what it offers in response is a toxic blend of collectivist politico-morality and crony capitalism draped in an American flag.

Ostensibly about the lack of public spirit in Silicon Valley, the book does not hesitate to make more sweeping claims about what ails society, often channeling the pseudo-conservative observations of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Tech companies are too hesitant, they argue, to do business with the federal government—primarily the military. This is bad in part because it will mean a strategic imbalance when it comes to America’s geopolitical rivalries. But more importantly, they see it as a crisis of identity and a sign of a lack of purpose.

Silicon Valley’s hesitancy comes not just because of activist employees and customers, but because their leadership has been raised in an environment of moral atrophy. They have been taught to repudiate traditional sources of meaning that, in the authors’ minds at least, find their fulfillment in a robust commitment to a national mission: “The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual.” For the authors, war—particularly manifested in the Manhattan Project—is the model of political activity, with each part of society willing to play its part in the national symphony directed by the state and made possible by the brave new world of technological mastery.

The alternative to this model, they suggest, is a low consumerism that distracts the public with frivolities. Much is made of “Farmville,” the vapid, web-based game that enjoyed a brief period of intense popularity in the early 2010s. That example is meant to symbolically represent any tech advancement not made with and for government. This, they say, is what “the market” produces: digital trinkets that offer entertainment or convenience but nothing that gives us meaning and purpose in our lives.

Thus, the premise of the book hinges on the crucial and pervasive error that seems universal today: namely, that there is a binary choice between, on the one hand, loose individualism centered on passing desires and, on the other, a commitment to a collective national vision. There is no suggestion at all that human beings may find meaning and purpose beyond their own appetites in anything other than politics. 

Their concern for the humanities and the cultivation of the mind, for instance, is rooted in a fear that people aren’t thinking hard enough about what our grand national mission should be, and they may not have the mental vocabulary to drum up the thumos to give oneself over to the cause: “An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world,” they worry. Religion is only briefly mentioned, but it turns out the authors want God only for his instrumental value in bolstering the state: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state?”

The book studiously fails to question any of the conceits of collectivism or even point to its limits. The authors frequently speak of what “we,” “the nation,” and “the public” have done or must do, as if those are all unitary thinking, willful beings. For instance, they claim that “we have … ceded direction over our interior lives … to the market.” (Speak for yourself.) In one telling phrase, they even address culture in the same way: “We have, as a culture, decided.” This isn’t all that uncommon in casual discourse, but it is revealing. Culture doesn’t think, decide, or act. And the solution to a corrupted culture is not simply to hope that, as a whole, it will think, decide, or act differently.

As for the dangers of collectivist thinking, the authors never consider whether the government may be its own kind of consumer, with its own kind of base and selfish desires to fulfill when it gets in bed with big business. It is almost always treated as the straightforward advocate of “the public interest.” There is little or no discussion of how that substantive “public interest” is to be determined other than that “we” ought to decide it. There is no concern that their prescription would merely result in crony capitalism, leading to a farcical game in which industries, particular companies, and their political allies try to outdo one another in showing how their interests are vital to the “public good.” They do seem to recognize that China is largely operating on their model and using it to pursue terrible objectives. But we would never do those things.

Their collectivism also extends to morality. A moral life, they suggest, is defined as having “grand belief structures” and “affirmative conceptions of what a collective life could or ought to be.” Those who are skeptical of such visions, the authors label “amoral.” This sort of “grand plan” morality implicitly denigrates both human freedom and traditional checks on personal behavior, both of which fall before the demand that we play our part in re-creating the world according to the commanding vision. One of the West’s greatest civil achievements has been its demonstration that a moral life is compatible with—indeed, made possible by—freedom from a commanding vision.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw, however, is that for all the insistence on this grand political vision, Karp and Zamiska never bother to formulate what that vision really is. The phrase “political project” is peppered across the pages as the key to breaking out of “our” malaise. They also recognize that there is no naturally occurring unity across America, and thus the national or civilizational purposes they seek must be consciously “constructed” or “manufactured” through a uniform education system, forced conscription, or national service. But what exactly we’re pursuing is left vague. It’s clear enough that conquering nature is more their speed than purifying morals or equalizing outcomes, but the main point seems simply to be that we need some national project—any national project. As long as humane technologists are in charge, their refined imagination will surely come up with something.

There is certainly much to critique about Silicon Valley and the vapid products its companies hawk. And the success of “Farmville,” Instagram, and other examples is at least partially due to the hollowed-out minds and chests of modern man. But this is not the product of free markets or any perceived decline in belief in the nation. Far more important has been the erosion of overlapping social authorities that once contributed to the formation of character at the local and personal level.

And nothing did more to undermine these sources of social authority than the pursuit of national missions. The full-blown culture of repudiation was not born fully formed and armed from the head of Abbie Hoffman. It came only after decades of twentieth-century nationalization across Western countries (the very decades Karp and Zamiska yearn for) had eroded, absorbed, or politicized the role of churches, local communities, and private associations. The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state. As the children of this generation came to see the failures and hypocrisies of the various national “projects” that had replaced those authorities, they saw the only reasonable response as a rejection of everything.

Conservative readers—of this book and of social commentary more generally—would do well to recognize that a self-declared commitment to Western civilization is not in and of itself indicative of a salutary teaching. When so many enemies of civilization are upfront with their hostility, perhaps it has become too easy to forget that draping oneself in the flag isn’t any guarantee of pure motives. There is still no shortage of deceptive wolves in sheep’s clothing, and no shortage of bad visions for civilizational “renewal.”

In fact, even the culture of repudiation itself is a kind of debased civilizational project, even if its advocates would blanch at the suggestion. The culture of repudiation was not entirely a foreign virus that infected Western civilization out of nowhere. It was, rather, a distortion of and overreliance on certain elements of the very tradition the radicals thought they were rejecting. Political toleration and self-criticism are distinctive qualities of Western civilization. In grasping on to these and similar values and attempting to make them universal, commanding principles, these radicals inadvertently established a new set of hegemonic Western values.

Indeed, the left-progressive or “woke” cause quite often manifests a haughty civilizational chauvinism in how it depicts and engages with non-Western civilizations, reflecting the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is only the West that is enlightened enough to reject its cultural inheritance.

Which is to say that Western civilization is a house with many mansions. And attempting to single out a particular value or principle—whether it is self-criticism or the spirit of scientific discovery—and make it the centerpiece of a political “project” is not the way to renew civilization. That will only build a house on sand. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Karp’s company, which has acquired nearly $1 billion of government contracts recently, would be working on data consolidation for the government that could easily translate into a master database on every American. That sort of information in the hands of the state would seem to be a significant threat to the liberties that Western countries have held dear. But there is nothing to fear—the CEO in charge has read Allan Bloom.